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Little Rock,976
December 30, 1862.
SIR: My letters, in respectful terms, addressed to your Adjutant General, when I re-assumed command of the Indian Country, late in October, have not been fortunate enough to be honored with a reply. This will reach you through another medium, and so that others besides yourself shall know its contents. I am no longer an officer under you, but a private citizen, and free, so far as any citizen of Arkansas can call himself free while he lives in this State; and I
will see whether you are as impervious to all other considerations, as you are to all sense of courtesy and justice.
You were sent out to Arkansas with certain positive orders, which you were immediately to enforce. You knew that "Gen Hindman never was the commanding General of the Trans. Mississippi Department," and was not sent there by the War Department; and that, therefore and of course, all his orders were illegal, for want of power. You knew that he never had any right to interfere with my command in the Department of Indian Territory, to take away my troops and ordnance,
or to send me any orders whatever; and that therefore I was wholly in the right, in all my controversy with him. You knew, also, that in stripping the Indian Country of troops, artillery, arms and ammunition, he had been guilty of multiplied outrages, contrary to the will and policy of the President, forbidden by the Secretary of War for the future, and hostile to the interests of the Confederacy.
I had been advised by the Secretary of War, on the 14th of July, before you were unfortunately thought of [in] connection with the Trans. Mississippi Department, that Gen. Magruder was assigned to the command of it; and that although I would be under his command, it was not doubted that my relations with him would be pleasant and harmonious, and that I would have such latitude in command of the Indian country, as might be necessary for me to act to the best
advantage in its defense. And by the same letter I was advised, that it was regretted I had met with so many embarrassments in procuring supplies; and that an order had been issued from the Adjutant and Inspector General's Office, to prevent the pursuing of such courses as I had complained of, in the seizure of what I had procured; and the Secretary said it was to be hoped that neither I nor any other officer would hereafter have cause to complain of supplies
being diverted from their legitimate destination. And that Gen. Magruder might fully understand my position, &c., a copy of my letter of 8th June, to General Hindman, stating in detail the plundering process to which the Indian Service had before then been subjected, was furnished to the former officer. Three several copies of this letter were sent me, that it might be certain to reach me.
I do not repeat the substance of that letter, for your benefit. You have known it, no doubt, ever since you left Richmond. You told me in August, that the War Department was fully informed in regard to the matters between myself and Generals Van Dorn and Hindman. You spoke it in the way of a taunt, and as if the Department justified them and condemned me. You meant me so to understand it. You are a very ingenious person; inasmuch as you knew the exact contrary to
be true. When I afterwards received the Secretary's letter, I remembered your remark, and did not doubt, and do not now doubt, that when you were substituted for Gen. Magruder, you received the same instructions that had been given him and were yourself furnished with a copy of the same letter, for the same purpose.
At all events, you were sent out to put an end to his outrages, and to avert, if you could, the mischief's about to spring from them. But when you reached Little Rock, you found him there, and you found that the troops, artillery, ammunition and stores that had reached and were on their way there from the Indian Country, under his unrighteous orders, and which it was your duty to restore to me, were too valuable to be parted with, if that could be in any way
avoided. Probably you foresaw that you might, by and by need to seize money and supplies procured by me. Twenty-six pieces of artillery, a supply of fixed ammunition and other trifles, on hand, with $1,350,000 in money, and over 6,000 suits of clothing in prospect, were the bait Hindman had to tempt you withal; and for it you sold your soul, as Faust sold his to Mephistopheles. Your Lieutenant became your master; you found it convenient to believe his version of
every thing, and to justify him in every thing, and you ended in making all his devilments your own, and adopting the whole infernal spawn and brood, with additions of your own to the family.
You told me in August, that you had been prepared to judge me favorably, until you read my address to the Indians on resigning my command, but after that, you could not judge me fairly. I did not in the least doubt the fact; but I did not believe the reason. What, moreover, had you to judge in regard to me? You were not sent to judge any body. Hindman was the criminal you were to operate upon.
And, if you were sent, or had otherwise any right, to judge me, you administered the sort of justice that is in vogue in hell. Before you saw me, you heard him. You adopted all his views, and never asked me a question in regard to our controversy, or as to my own action, or the condition of things in the Indian Country. I had been infamously and assiduously slandered, from the moment when I began to resist his illegal, impolitic and outrageous attempts to deprive
the Indian Department of every thing, to make it a mere appendage of, and appendix to, North-Western Arkansas, to take the Indians again out of their own country, and to compel me to unite in that insane and miserable "expedition into Missouri," which was projected and planned by Folly, mis-managed and misconduct by Imbecility and ended, as I knew it would, in disaster and disgrace. Lies of all varieties were ingeniously and laboriously invented at and about Head
Quarters, and dispatches, by special and fit agents, to be industriously circulated throughout the Indian Country and Texas, as well as Arkansas. The Indians were told that I had carried away into Texas the gold and silver belonging to them; while the Texans were made to believe that I was paying their moneys to the Indians. It was reported, in Bonham, Texas, by officers sent from Hindman's Head Quarters, that I was defaulter to the amount of $125,000 and at last
there crawled out from the sewer under the throne, and sneaked about the Indian Country and Texas, the damnable lie, that an Indian had been taken, bearing letters from me to the Northern Indians, or, to the enemy in Kansas; or, as another version had it, from Gen. James H. Lane to me; and three months ago it was whispered about that I was a member of the secret disloyal organization in Northern Texas. Such lies could have been counted by scores. Most of them are
dead and rotten; but some still live, by means of assiduous nursing. And all these lies, and more either you or Hindman sent to the President at Richmond.
I say, sir, you never inquired into any thing. You never wished to hear any thing, whatever from me. You disobeyed the orders with which you were sent as a public curse and calamity into Arkansas, as if the State were not already sufficiently infested by Hindman. Is it true that he has lately, upon his single order, and without the ceremony of even a mock trial, caused three men "suspected of disloyalty" to be shot; and that, two of them being proven to him to be
true Southern men, he sent a reprieve, which, either setting out too late, or lagging on the way, reached the scene of murder after their blood had bathed the desecrated soil of Arkansas? It has come to me so, from officers direct from Fort Smith. At any rate, he has put to death nine or ten persons, without any legal trial. Who is he, that he should do these things in this nineteenth century? And who are you, sir, that you should suffer, and by suffering, approve
and adopt them? How many more murders will suffice to awaken public vengeance?
Was the Star Chamber any worse than Hindman's Military Commissions, that are ordered to preserve no records? Were the Letters de Cachet of Louis XV, any greater outrage on the personal liberty of French subjects, than Hindman's arrests and committal to the Penitentiary of suspected persons? Was Tristan l'Hermite any more the minister of tyranny, than his Provost Marshals? or Caligula, Caesar Borgia or Colonel Kirke any more cruel and remorseless than he, that you
have sustained all his acts, and made all his atrocities your own? Take care, sir! You are not so high, that you may not be reached by the arm of justice. The President is above you both, and God is above him, and sometimes interferes in human affairs.
Unless the late Secretary of War, through the President, sent an official falsehood to the Congress of the Confederate States, you were sent to Arkansas with positive and unconditional instructions, that, if Gen. Hindman had declared Martial Law in Arkansas, and adopted oppressive police regulations under it, you should rescind the declarations of Martial Law, and the Regulations adopted to carry it into effect. You have not done so. You have not only not
rescinded any thing; but you have, by a General Order, long ago, continued in force all orders of General Hindman, not specially revoked by you. That order could have no retroactive effect, to make his orders to have been valid in the past. It could only put them in force for the future; and you thereby made them your orders, as fully as if you had re-issued them. In so doing, you became the enemy of your country, if not of the Human race, and outlawed yourself.
You have yourself established a tariff of prices exclusively on articles produced by the farmers, including the sweet potatoes raised by old women and superannuated negroes. You leave the Jews and extortionist, some of the former of whom go about in uniforms, claiming to be officers and your agents to charge these same venders of produce, whatever infamous prices they please for wares they need to purchase with the pittances received according to your scale of
prices, for the vegetables that supply your and other tables.
You pretend, I learn, that the President gave you discretionary power, in regard to Martial Law, and the Regulations in question. I do not believe it; for, if he did, then he and the Secretary intentionally deceived Congress by the equivalent of a lie. Do you pretend that the President paltered with Congress in a double sense? I put you face to face. Is it your act, in defiance of orders, that continues Martial Law in force in Arkansas, stifles freedom of speech,
muzzles the Press, tramples on all the rights at once of the People of that State, and makes the State itself only a congregation of Helots, incompetent to be represented in Congress? Is it merely a contest between you and Phelps, which of the two shall be Military Governor? If it is your act, then justice ought at once to be done upon you, lest the President, winking at the outrage, and not stripping from your back your uniform of Lieutenant General, should
deserve to be impeached, as your accomplice.
Or, do you dare assert that it is his act, because he gave you discretionary power on the subject, after informing Congress that Hindman never was Commanding General of the Department, and that you had been ordered to rescind his declaration of Martial Law,—nay, after publicly proclaiming that no General had any power to declare Martial Law? All the Confederacy thanked and applauded him for so striking at the root of an immense outrage and abuse and an unexpected
public course; but if he has authorized or sanctions your course, he is unworthy longer to be President. If he has not, you have defied his orders and justified men in judging yourself authorized and him guilty; and so you are unworthy longer to be General.
When I saw you in August, you were greatly exercised on the subject of my printed address to the Indians, publication of which in Little Rock you had suppressed, as if it could do any harm in Arkansas. You suppressed it, because it exposed those whose acts were losing the Indian Country. You wanted to keep what had been taken from me, and to escape damnation for the probable consequences of the acts, the profit of which you were reluctant to part with. I do not
wonder the letter troubled you; for it told the truth, and condemned and denounced in advance more unjustifiable courses of conduct that you were about to pursue.
You pretended that it had produced a great "ferment" among the Indians; and that even many of the Chickasaws had in consequence of it, left the service. It had produced no ferment, and none of the Chickasaws had left us. On the contrary, the Indians were quieted by it, the Creeks re-organized, in numbers, two regiments, and the Chickasaws five companies. That was its purpose, and such was its effect.
But to you, its enormity consisted in its exposure of the conduct of two Major Generals. I told the Indians plainly, that it was not my fault or the fault of the Government, but of these two Generals, that moneys, clothing, arms and ammunition, procured for them, had not reached them; that troops raised for service among them had never entered their country; and that, finally, troops, artillery and ammunition were carried out of it. This censure of my superiors,
in vindication of the President and Government, shocked your tender sensibilities. You were ready to follow in their footsteps, and already had the plunder; and you told me that "the act of the officer was the act of the Government." Did you really mean, that the Indians should have been led or left to suppose that these acts were the acts of the Government? That would have been almost as great an infamy, as it was to take the supplies, and so give them cause and
reason to believe the robbery the act of the Government, and thus excite them to revolt. Moreover, when I told you that the act of the officer was not, in the case in question, the act of the Government; that, if I had permitted the Indians to suppose so, they would long have left us; and that, to quiet them, I had been compelled, for three months and more than a hundred times, to explain to them what had become of their supplies, and how and by whom they
have been seized, you admitted that "that was right for local explanation." As there could be no objection to telling all, what I had often told part, that they might tell the rest; and as it was no more a crime to print than to say it; I have the right to believe and I do believe that your real objection to its publication was that it exposed to our own people the actual conduct of other Generals, and the intended conduct of yourself. Have you left the Indians to
believe that the late seizure and appropriation, by yourself, of their clothing and moneys, is the act of the Government? If you have, you ought to be shot as a Traitor, for provoking them to revolt, and giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
But you told me, that when you first read my letter, you held up your hands, and exclaimed, "What! is the man a Traitor?" And you said that not one of my friends in Little Rock, and I had, you said, a great many, pretended to justify the letter. You have never found a friend of mine, or an indifferent person, silly enough to think, like you, that it savored of treason. It is only rarely one meets a man so scantily furnished with sense as to misunderstand and
pervert what is written in plain English. I was vindicating myself, and still more the Government, and persuading the Indians to remain loyal, notwithstanding the wrongs they had endured. I, too, was an officer; and my acts had been the acts of the Government. My promises to them were its promises. The procuring of supplies by me, was its act; and when, reaching or not reaching the frontier, the supplies were like the unlucky traveler, who journeyed from Jerusalem
to Jericho, then the Government ceased to act, and unlicensed outrage took its place. And, further, my act was the act of the Government, when I told the Indians why they had not received their supplies and money, and vindicated that Government at the expense of those who were guilty of the act; and who having done it and reaped the profit, should not be heard to object that all the world should know what they did, nor be allowed to escape the responsibility of
all the consequences.
If to tell the Indians that other Generals had wrongfully stopped their supplies, in any degree resembled Treason, that could only be so, because it was treason to do the act. It cannot be wrong to make known what it was right and proper to do. The truth is, that the acts done were outrages, which it was desirable for the doers to conceal from the Indians. I refused to become a party to those outrages, by concealing them. I would not agree in advance to be silent,
when you should repeat and improve on those outrages, and consummate what had been so felicitously begun.
I do not doubt that there are assassins wearing uniforms, who are knaves enough to pretend to read my letter as you do, and to see in it the desire of a disappointed man to be revenged, even by the ruin of his country. Power always has its pimps and catamites. These would no doubt gladly have made my letter the means of murdering me by that devilish engine of Military despotism, a Military commission, that is ordered to preserve no records. You, I think really
look upon it with alarm. It is, no doubt, very desirable to you, that the blame of losing the Indian Country, which, if not already a fact accomplished, is a fact inevitable, should be made to fall upon me. You, as the pliant and useful implement of Gen. Hindman, are the cause of this loss; and you know I can prove it. You and he have left nothing undone, that could be done, to lose it. And you may rest assured, that whether I live or die, you shall not escape one
jot or title of the deep damnation to which you are richly entitled for causing a loss so irretrievable, so astounding, so unnecessary and so fatal, and one which it will be impossible to excuse as owing to ignorance and stupidity. No degree of these misfortunes, can be pleaded in bar of judgment. You will have forced the Indians to go to the North for protection. You will have given away their country to the enemy. You will have turned their arms against us. You
will have done this by disobeying the orders of your Government, continuing the courses it condemned, and to put an end to which it sent you out here; by falsifying its pledges and promises, taking for others' uses the moneys which it sent out to pay the Indians, robbing them of the clothing sent by it to cover their nakedness, and thus thrusting aside all the considerations of common honesty, of justice, of humanity, and even of policy, expediency and common
sense.
When Mr. C.B. Johnson agreed, in September to loan your Quartermaster at Little Rock, $350,000 of the money he was conveying to Major Quesenbury, the Quartermaster of the Department of Indian Territory, you promised him that it should be repaid to Major Quesenbury as soon as you should receive funds, and before he would have disposed of the remaining million. You got the money by means of that promise; and you did not keep the promise. On the contrary, by an order
that reached Fort Smith three hours before Mr. Johnson did, you compelled Major Quesenbury, the moment he received the money, to turn every dollar of it, over to a Commissary at Fort Smith; and it was used to supply the needs of Gen. Hindman's troops; when the Seminoles, fourteen months in the service have never been paid a dollar; and the Chickasaw and Choctaw Battalion, and Chilly McIntosh's Creeks, each corps a year and more in the service, have received only
$45,000 each, and no clothing. Was this violation of your promise, the act of the Government?
To replace the clothing I had procured for the Indians in December, 1861, and which, with near 1,000 tents, fell into the hands of the troops of Generals Price and Van Dorn, I sent an agent, in June, to Richmond, who went to Georgia, and there procured some 6,500 suits, with about 3,000 shirts and 3,000 pairs of drawers, and some two or three hundred tents. These supplies were at Monroe early in September; and the Indians were informed that they and the moneys had
been procured and were on the way. The good news went all over their country, as if on the wings of the wind; and universal content and rejoicing were the consequences.
The clothing reached Fort Smith; and its issue to Gen. Hindman's people commenced immediately. I sent a Quartermaster for it and he was retained there. If any of it has ever reached the Indians, it has been only recently, and but a small portion of it.
You pretend to believe that the Indians were in a "ferment" and discontented; and you took this very opportune occasion to stop all the moneys due their troops and for debts in their country and take and appropriate to the use of other troops the clothing promised to and procured for them. The clothing and the money were theirs; and you were in possession of an order from the War Department, forbidding you to divert any supplies from their legitimate destination;
an order which was issued, as you knew, in consequence of my complaints, and to prevent moneys and supplies for the Indians being stopped: and yet you stopped all. You borrow part of the money, and then seize the rest, like a genteel highwayman, who first borrows all he can of a traveler, on promise of punctual re-payment; and then claps a pistol to his head, and orders him to "stand and deliver" the rest. And you did even more than this.
For you promised the Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs, when he was at Little Rock, about the 1st of October, on his way to the Indian Country, to give the Indians assurances of the good faith of the Government—you promised him, I say, that the clothing in question should go to the Indians. He told the Chickasaws and Seminoles, at least, of this promise. You broke it. You did not send them the clothing. You placed the Commissioner and the Government in an
admirable attitude before the Indians; and the consequence has been, I understand, the disbanding of the Chickasaws, and the failure of the Seminole troops to re-organize. The consequence will be far more serious yet. Indians cannot be deceived, and promises made them shamelessly broken, with impunity.
While you were thus stopping their clothing, and robbing the half-naked Indians to clothe other troops, the Federals were sending home the Choctaws whom they had taken prisoners, after clothing them comfortably and putting money in their pockets. No one need be astonished, when all the Indians shall have turned their arms against us.
Why did you and Gen. Hindman not procure by your own exertions what you need for your troops? He reached Little Rock on the 31st of May. You came here in August. I sent my agents to Richmond, for money and clothing, in June and July. I never asked either of you for any thing. I could procure for my command all I wanted. You and he were Major Generals; I, only a Brigadier; and Brigadiers are plenty as blackberries in season. It is to be supposed that if I could
procure money, clothing and supplies for Indians, you and he could do so for white troops. Both of you come blundering out to Arkansas with nothing, and supply yourselves with what I procure. Some officers would be ashamed so to supply deficiencies caused by their own want of foresight, energy or sense.
You do not even know you need an Engineer, until one of mine comes by, with $20,000 in his hands for Engineer Service in the Indian Territory, some of which belongs to me for advances made, and with stationery and instruments procured by me, for my Department, in Richmond, a year ago; and then you find out that there are such things as Engineers, and that you need one; and you seize on Engineer, money, and stationery. You even take, notwithstanding Paragraph VI,
of General Orders No. 50, the stationery procured by me for the Adjutant General's Office of my Department, by purchase in Richmond in December, 1861; for the want of which I had been compelled to permit my own private stock to be used for months.
I no longer wonder that you do these things. When you told me that you could not judge me fairly, because I told the Indians that others had done them injustice, you confessed much more than you intended. It was a pregnant sentence you uttered. By it you judged and convicted yourself, and pronounced your own sentence, when you uttered it.
The Federal authorities were proposing to the Indians at the very time when you stopped their clothing and money, that, if they would return to the old Union, they should not be asked to take up arms, their annuities should be paid them in money, the negroes taken from them be restored, all losses and damage sustained by them be paid for, and they be allowed to retain, as so much clear profit, what had been paid them by the Confederate States. It was a liberal
offer and a great temptation, to come at the moment when you and Hindman were felicitously completing your operations, and when there were no breadstuffs in their country, and they and their women and children were starving and half-naked. You chose an admirable opportunity to rob, to disappoint, to outrage and exasperate them, and make your own Government fraudulent and contemptible in their eyes. If any human action can deserve it, the hounds of hell ought to
hunt your soul and Hindman's for it through all eternity.
Instead of co-operating with the Federal authorities, and doing all that he and you could do to induce the Indians to listen to and accept their propositions, he had better have expelled the enemy from Arkansas or "have perished in the attempt;" and you had better have marched on Helena, before its fortifications were finished, and purged the eastern part of the State of the enemy's presence. If you had succeeded as admirably in that, as you have in losing the
Indian Country, you would have merited the eternal gratitude of Arkansas, instead of its execrations; and the laurel, instead of a halter. I said that you and your Lieutenant had left nothing undone. I repeat it. Take another small example. Until I left the command, at the end of July, the Indian troops had regularly had their half rations of coffee. As soon as I was got rid of, an order from Gen. Hindman took all the remaining coffee, some 3,000 lbs., to Fort
Smith. Even in this small matter, he could not forego an opportunity of injuring and disappointing them.
You asked me, in August, what was the need of any white troops at all, in the Indian Country; and you said that the few mounted troops, I had, if kept in the Northern part of the Cherokee Country, would have been enough to repel any Federal force that ever would have entered it. As you and Hindman never allowed any ammunition procured by me, to reach the Indian Country, if you could prevent it, whether I obtained it at Richmond or Corinth, or in Texas, and as you
approve of his course in taking out of that country all that was to be found in it, I am entitled to suppose that you regarded ammunition for the Indians as little necessary, as troops to protect them in conformity to the pledge of honor of the Government. One thing, however, is to be said to the credit of your next in command. When he has ordered anything to be seized, he has never denied having done so, or tried to cast responsibility on an inferior. After you
had written to me that you had ordered Col. Darnell to seize, at Dallas, Texas, ammunition furnished by me, you denied to him, I understand, that you had given the order. Is it so? and did he refuse to trust the order in your hands, or even to let you see it, but would show it to Gen. McCulloch?
Probably you know by this time, if you are capable of learning any thing, whether any white troops are needed in the Indian Country. The brilliant result of Gen. Hindman's profound calculations and masterly strategy, and of his long-contemplated invasion of Missouri, is before the country; and the disgraceful rout at Fort Wayne, with the manoeuvres and results on the Arkansas, are pregnant commentaries on the abuse lavished on me, for not taking "the line of the
Arkansas," or making Head Quarters on Spring River, with a force too small to effect any thing any where.
I have not spoken of your Martial Law and Provost Marshals in the Indian Country, and your seizure of salt-works there, or, in detail, of your seizure of ammunition procured by me in Texas, and on its way to the Indian troops, of the withdrawal of all white troops and artillery from their country, of the retention for other troops of the mountain howitzers procured by me for Col. Waitie, and the ammunition sent me, for them and for small arms, from Richmond. This
letter is but a part of the indictment I will prefer bye and bye, when the laws are no longer silent, and the constitution and even public opinion no longer lie paralyzed under the brutal heel of Military Power; and when the results of your impolicy and mismanagement shall have been fully developed.
But I have a word or two to say as to myself. From the time when I entered the Indian Country, in May, 1861, to make Treaties, until the beginning of June, 1862, when Gen. Hindman, in the plentitude of his self-conceit and folly, assumed absolute control of the Military and other affairs of the Department of Indian Territory, and commenced plundering it of troops, artillery and ammunition, dictating Military operations, and making the Indian country an appendage
of Northwestern Arkansas, there was profound peace throughout its whole extent. Even with the wild Comanche and Kiowa, I had secured friendly relations. An unarmed man could travel in safety and alone, from Kansas to Red River, and from the Arkansas line to the Wichita Mountains. The Texan frontier had not been as perfectly undisturbed for years. We had fifty-five hundred Indians in service, under arms, and they were as loyal as our own people, little as had been
done by any one save myself to keep them so, and much as had been done by others to alienate them. They referred all their difficulties to me for decision, and looked to me alone to see justice done them and the faith of Treaties preserved.
Most of the time without moneys (those sent out to that Department generally failing to reach it) I had managed to keep the white and Indian troops better fed than any other portion of the troops of the Confederacy any where. I had 26 pieces of artillery, two of the batteries as perfectly equipped and well manned as any, any where. I had on hand and on the way, an ample supply of ammunition, after being once plundered. While in command, I had procured, first and
last, 36,000 pounds of rifle and cannon powder. If you would like to know, sir, how I effected this, in the face of all manner of discouragements and difficulties, it is no secret. My disbursing officers can tell you who supplied them with funds for many weeks, and whose means purchased horses for the artillery. Ask the Chickasaws and Seminoles who purchased the only shoes they had received—four hundred pairs, at five dollars each, procured and paid for by me, in
Bonham, and which I sent up to them after I was taken "in personal custody" in November.
You dare pretend, sir, that I might be disloyal, or even in thought couple the word Treason with my name. What peculiar merit is it in you to serve on our side in this war? You were bred a soldier, and your only chance for distinction lay in obtaining promotion in the army, and in the army of the Confederacy. You were Major, or something of the sort, in the old army, and you are a Lieutenant General. Your reward I think, for what you have done or not done, is
sufficient.
I was a private citizen, over fifty years of age, and neither needing nor desiring military rank or civil honors. I accepted the office of Commissioner, at the President's solicitation. I took that of Brigadier General, with all the odium that I knew would follow it, and fall on me as the Leader of a force of Indians, knowing there would be little glory to be reaped, and wanting no promotion, simply and solely to see my pledges to the Indians carried out, to keep
them loyal to us, to save their country to the Confederacy, and to preserve the Western frontier of Arkansas and the Northern frontier of Texas from devastation and desolation.
What has been my reward? All my efforts have been rendered nugatory, and my attempts even to collect and form an army frustrated, by the continual plundering of my supplies and means by other Generals, and your and their deliberate efforts to disgust and alienate the Indians. Once before this, an armed force was sent to arrest me. You all disobeyed the President's orders, and treated me as a criminal for endeavoring to have them carried out. The whole country
swarms with slanders against me; and at last, because I felt constrained reluctantly to re-assume command, after learning that the President would not accept my resignation, I am taken from Tishomingo to Washington, a prisoner, under an armed guard, it having been deemed necessary, for the sake of effect, to send two hundred and fifty men into the Indian Country to arrest me. The Senatorial election was at hand. I had, unaided and alone, secured to the Confederacy
a magnificent country, equal in extent, fertility, beauty and resources to any of our States—nay, superior to any. I had secured the means, in men and arms, of keeping it. I knew how only it could be defended. I asked no aid of any of you. I only asked to be let alone. Verily, I have my reward also, as Hastings had his, for winning India for the British Empire.
It is your day now. You sit above the laws and domineer over the constitution. "Order reigns in Warsaw." But bye and bye, there will be a just jury empanelled, who will hear all the testimony and decide impartially—no less a jury than the People of the Confederate States; and for their verdict as to myself, I and my children will be content to wait; as also for the sure and stern sentence and universal malediction, that will fall like a great wave of God's just
anger on you and the murderous miscreant by whose malign promptings you are making yourself accursed.
Whether I am respectfully yours, you will be able to determine from the contents of this letter.
Albert Pike, Citizen of Arkansas.
Theophilus H. Holmes, Major General &c.
976: Scottish Rite Temple, Pike Papers.
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The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War, 1919
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