Читать книгу The History of American Indian in the Period of Reconstruction - Annie Heloise Abel - Страница 3

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The present is the concluding volume of the Slaveholding Indians series. Its title may be thought somewhat misleading since the time limits of the period covered by no means coincide with those commonly understood as signifying the Reconstruction Period of United States History. In that history, the word, reconstruction, which ought, etymologically, to imply the process of re-building and restoring, has attained, most unfortunately, a meaning all its own, a meaning now technical, nothing more nor less, in fact, than political re-adjustment. It is in the light of that meaning, definite and technical, that the limits of this book have been determined.

The treaties made with the great southern tribes in 1866 were reconstruction treaties pure and simple and this volume, therefore, finds its conclusion in their negotiation. They marked the establishment of a new relationship with the United States government; but their serious and far-reaching effects would constitute too long and too painful a story for narration here. Its chapters would include an account of tribal dissensions without number or cessation, of the pitiful racial deterioration of the Creeks due to unchecked mixture with the negroes, of the influx of a white population outnumbering and over-reaching the red, and, finally, of great tragedies that had for their theme the compulsory removal of such tribes as the inoffensive Nez Perces, the aggressive Poncas, and the noble Cheyennes.

In recent years, an increasing interest has been aroused in the course of the westward movement socalled and, little by little, the full significance of American expansion is being appreciated. In less than a century of time, the United States has extended itself over the vast reaches of this continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific and its territorial growth has necessarily involved the displacement of the aborigines. Its treatment of them is bound to concern very greatly the historian of the future, whose mental grasp will be immeasurably greater than is that of the men, who now write and teach American history in the old conventional way with a halo around New England and the garb of aristocracy enveloping Virginia. It is in American History rightly proportioned that the present study will have its place.

ANNIE HELOISE ABEL

Washington, D.C., March, 1920