The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864

His remains were removed in a golden coffin by a procession of distinguished civilians and the whole army, from Nicomedia to Constantinople, and deposited, with the highest Christian honors, in the Church of the Apostles, while the Roman senate, after its ancient custom, proudly ignoring the great religious revolution of the age, enrolled him among the gods of the heathen Olympus. Soon after his death, Eusebius set him above the greatest princes of all times; from the fifth century he began to be recognized in the East as a saint; and the Greek and Russian Church to this day celebrates his memory under the extravagant title of Isapostolos, the 'Equal of the Apostles.' The Latin Church, on the contrary, with truer tact, has never placed him among the saints, but has been content with naming him 'the Great,' in just and grateful remembrance of his services to the cause of Christianity and civilization.

Constantine marks the beginning of the downfall of ancient and classical paganism. Still it dragged out a sickly old age for about two hundred years longer, until at last it died of incurable consumption, without the hope of a resurrection.

The final dissolution of heathenism in the Eastern empire may be dated from the middle of the fifth century. In the year 435, Theodosius II. commanded the temples to be destroyed or turned into churches. There still appear some heathens in civil office and at court so late as the beginning of the reign of Justinian I. (527-567). But this despotic emperor prohibited heathenism as a form of worship in the empire on pain of death, and in 529 abolished the last intellectual seminary of it, the philosophical school of Athens, which had stood nine hundred years. At that time just seven philosophers were teaching in that school, the shades of the ancient seven sages of Greece—a striking play of history, like the name of the last West-Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, or, in contemptuous diminutive, Augustulus, combining the names of the founder of the city and the founder of the empire.

In the West, heathenism maintained itself until near the middle of the sixth century, and even later, partly as a private religious conviction among many cultivated and aristocratic families in Rome, partly even in the full form of worship in the remote provinces and on the mountains of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, and partly in heathen customs and popular usages, like the gladiatorial shows still extant in Rome in 404, and the wanton Lupercalia, a sort of heathen carnival, the feast of Lupercus, the god of herds, still celebrated with all its excesses in February, 495. But, in general, it may be said that the Græco-Roman heathenism, as a system of worship, was buried under the ruins of the Western empire, which sank under the storms of the great migration. It is remarkable that the northern barbarians labored with the same zeal in the destruction of idolatry as in the destruction of the empire, and really promoted the victory of the Christian religion. The Gothic king Alaric, on entering Rome, expressly ordered that the churches of the apostles Peter and Paul should be spared, as inviolable sanctuaries; and he showed a humanity, which Augustin justly attributes to the influence of Christianity (even perverted Arian Christianity) on these barbarous people. The Christian name, he says, which the heathens blaspheme, has effected not the destruction, but the salvation of the city. Odoacer, who put an end to the Western Roman empire in 476, was incited to his expedition into Italy by St. Severin, and, though himself an Arian, showed great regard to the catholic bishops. The same is true of his conqueror and successor, Theodoric the Ostrogoth, who was recognized by the East-Roman emperor Anastasius as king of Italy (A.D. 500), and was likewise an Arian. Thus between the barbarians and the Romans, as between the Romans and the Greeks, and in a measure also the Jews, the conquered gave laws to the conquerors. Christianity triumphed over both.

This is the end of Græco-Roman heathenism, with its power, wisdom, and beauty. It fell a victim to a slow but steady process of incurable consumption. Its downfall is a sublime tragedy which, with all our abhorrence of idolatry, we cannot witness without a certain sadness. At the first appearance of Christianity it comprised all the wisdom, literature, art, and political power of the civilized world, and led all into the field against the weaponless religion of the crucified Nazarene. After a conflict of four or five centuries it lay prostrate in the dust without hope of resurrection. With the outward protection of the state, it lost all power, and had not even the courage of martyrdom; while the Christian church showed countless hosts of confessors and blood-witnesses, and Judaism lives to-day in spite of all persecution. The expectation that Christianity would fall about the year 398, after an existence of three hundred and sixty-five years, turned out in the fulfilment to relate to heathenism itself.

The last glimmer of life in the old religion was its pitiable prayer for toleration and its lamentation over the ruin of the empire. Its best elements took refuge in the church, and became converted, or at least took Christian names. Now the gods were dethroned, oracles and prodigies ceased, sibylline books were burned, temples were destroyed, or transformed into churches, or still stand as memorials of the victory of Christianity.

But although ancient Greece and Rome have fallen forever, the spirit of Græco-Roman paganism is not extinct. It still lives in the natural heart of man, which at this day as much as ever needs regeneration by the spirit of God. It lives also in many idolatrous and superstitious usages of the Greek and Roman Churches, against which the pure spirit of Christianity has instinctively protested from the beginning, and will protest, till all remains of gross and refined idolatry shall be outwardly as well as inwardly overcome, and baptized and sanctified not only with water, but also with the spirit and fire of the gospel.

Finally, the better genius of ancient Greece and Rome still lives in the immortal productions of their poets, philosophers, historians, and orators—yet no longer an enemy, but a friend and servant of Christ. What is truly great and noble and beautiful can never perish. The classic literature had prepared the way for the gospel, in the sphere of natural culture, and was to be turned thenceforth into a weapon for its defence. It passed, like the Old Testament, as a rightful inheritance, into the possession of the Christian church, which saved those precious works of genius through the ravages of the migration of nations and the darkness of the Middle Ages, and used them as material in the rearing of the temple of modern civilization. The word of the great apostle of the Gentiles was here fulfilled: 'All things are yours.' The ancient classics, delivered from the dæmoniacal possession of idolatry, have come into the service of the only true and living God, once 'unknown' to them, but now everywhere revealed, and are thus enabled to fulfil their true mission as the preparatory tutors of youth for Christian learning and culture. This is the noblest, the most worthy, and most complete victory of Christianity, transforming the enemy into friend and ally.

CAUSES OF THE MINNESOTA MASSACRE

If great public phenomena do not come by chance, then there were causes for the Minnesota massacres, by the Sioux, in 1862-'3, quite apart from the aboriginal cruelty and ferocity of the Indian nature. We all know that the carnal Indian man is a bad enough fellow at the best, and capable of dreadful crimes and misdemeanors, if only to gratify his whim or the caprice of the moment. And when he is bent upon satiating his revenge for some real or imaginary wrong, I would back him in the horrible ingenuity of his devices for torture, in the unrelenting malice of his vengeance, against any—the most fierce and diabolical—of all the potentates in the kingdoms of eternal and immutable evil!

But the white man has always had the advantage of the red man. He was his superior in knowledge, power, and intellect; and came, for the most part, of that lordly race, the issue of whose loins already occupy all the chief countries within the zones of civilization. He knew, therefore, when he first began to deal with the Indian, what manner of man he was, what his enlightenment was, and how far it reached out into the darkness where all is night! He knew that this wild, savage, untamable redskin could not be approached, reconciled, traded with, or stolen, from, by adopting, in his case, the usages and courtesies of civil life, as we understand them, but that his own peculiar laws, customs, and manners must be studied and conformed to, if any headway were to be made in his regard and confidence.

At no time, from the beginning to the present day and hour, has any white man been so fuddled in his wits as to suppose that the Indian could either act or talk like a clergyman of any recognized Christian denomination. It was too much, therefore, to expect from him that he should exhibit any of the fine charities and warm affections which distinguish the Christian character. He was a redskin, implacable in his hate, not altogether trustworthy even in his friendships, and jealous of his reputation and the traditions of his race. Nor was he without manhood either. A brave, bloody, mocking and defiant manhood! capable of the endurances of the martyr, exhibiting sometimes the sublimest self-sacrifice and courage.

Whether out of these wild and savage materials there lay anywhere, at any time, the human or divine power to mould a civilized community, does not appear upon the record. It is certain, however, that after all the far-too-late attempts to transfigure these savages into the likeness of a down-East Yankee, or, better still, into the similitude of a Western farmer, no permanent good results are likely to ensue.

The red man and the white are separated indeed by the prodigious distances (ethnologically speaking) not only of race and language, but of noble tradition and glorious history. They could never amalgamate in blood, or in the so-called natural sympathies of man. They seem to be born enemies! as their feelings and their instincts apparently reach them when they come into contact with each other. They cannot exist side by side. A mightier than they holds the destinies of both in His hands. He has tried the redskins. He has given them a good chance upon the earth, and they have failed to do anything but kill buffalo and breed like rats—often burrowing like rats—refusing to dig and plant the teeming, beneficent earth which had been committed to their charge; and preferring, generally, the life of a vagabond loafer to that of a thrifty, careful husbandman.

I do not blame them. They are as God made them, and man left them; for, I suppose, their forebears—somewhere afar off in Asia, perhaps, in the dim, immemorial ages—had all passed through the various phases of the civilization of their time, and that they did not grow out of the tail of any gorilla. It is not for profane man to inquire what possible reason there could be for the perpetuation—let alone the creation—of such a useless, bootless race. There they are, occupiers of the soil for unknown centuries—before the white man ever saw their faces—many thousands of them still squatting there, cleaving, like bereaved Autochthons, to the bosom of the dear old mother who had whelped and so long nurtured them; and trying to make themselves believe that they are still masters of the continent.

What they were made for at all, I do not pretend to divine. The Divine Maker of all knows best, and what He does is its own justification—satisfying the wellnigh insatiable cry of the universe for universal justice. They are the saurians of humanity; and it is remarkable that the idea of 'progressive development'—if I may be pardoned for making use of a term in modern philosophy about which there has been so much assumption and canting—it is remarkable that this idea, which the name of saurian suggests, should run through all nature, and be embodied in her finest forms and intelligences. There is a considerable distance between the saurian and good Master Adam, the gardener of Eden; but it seems to me, after all, that this brutal, foul, obscene monster of the prime, was only Adam in the making. He came after him, a long way, at all events; and if geology had been fashionable in his time, and he a savant, he might have chalked out for himself a very fine pedigree.

For this strange, eccentric Nature, who meant man from the beginning, and failed to realize her ideal because of those horrible nightmare dreams of which these saurians, mastodons, mammoths were the visible representatives, did, nevertheless, make, in every succeeding world (for every crust of this planet is the crust of a dead world), higher and higher organizations—until, at last, she gave to man his inscrutable birth!

That was, no doubt, a great triumph of power and genius! Man is a noble animal, the finest of all living fellows! et cetera! et cetera! But what sort of a fellow was he when he came, in his spindles and shacklebones, from the womb of the All-mother? Was he a Caucasian, or a Mongolian, a Negro, a Malay, or a Bosjesman?—this last being an effigy of man so abominable that no race that I have heard of will include him even as a lodger in the parish settlements!

Mark! what a sameness, and yet what an infinite variety, there is in all the operations and purposes of Nature! She does not grow us men out of our mothers, but babes—helpless, pitiably, tearfully helpless babes!—ignorant; who must grow into the perfect stature and the mature mind of men. Is not this babe also a saurian in its little way? Does a wider gap separate the saurian from the man, than that which separates the tiny babe from some Bacon or Raleigh? The law of nature is progress. It is often, nay, always, a very slow thing—but how sure! how inevitable! how beneficent in its results! She never makes worse after bad—and those weird opium monsters of the foreworlds were unspeakably bad!—but always she makes of bad better; and of better she has made her best, at present. In the light of this law, were any one mad enough to grope, he might come to the conclusion that the first man (or race of men) was anything but a grandee in mind, person, or estate; and that our seemingly puzzled but at last most wonder-working mother, ycleped Nature, made some very ugly attempts at man before she reached the climax of her imagination and her power as it obtains in the man Caucasian!

I regard all the colored races—and with no malice or evil of any sort in my heart toward them—as first experiments in the gamut of human creation. Neither ethnology nor any other ology will pull out of my consciousness—let alone my active intellect—the belief that these were the oldest, the primordial races, or the descendants of such, and that the white Caucasian man, with his noble brain and heart, his matchless person, was an afterthought, the brightest since her birth-thought of the earth's creation. Look into the face of any upgrown modern Indian! It is an old face, as if the accumulated wrinkles of, not 'forty,' but a hundred 'centuries' had ploughed their marks there. They seem to belong to the dawn of time; while our Caucasian man is ever young and beautiful, the born master of all things.

We must deal with races according to their faculty, and credit them according to their faculty. If we fail, we fail in wisdom—and in prudence, which is a valuable attribute of wisdom. Expect not grapes from thistles! Expect no virtue—unless it relates to his own selfishness or his own tribe—from an Indian, or from very many other men!

It must not be forgotten, however, that Indians are people who, to say the least of them, are fashioned in the likeness of men. Here, as elsewhere, Nature sticks to her old plan, and will not budge an inch. In the chart of the Indian's nature are mapped out the same feelings, instincts, passions, the same organs and dimensions as belong to the highest race, or the highest race of the mixed races. She will have no nonsense about her red children, nor about her black. There they are, as she (for purposes of her own, not particularly clear) intended them to be—men, alive, oh!—not descendants of Monboddo's ape, nor of Du Chaillu's gorilla, but men proper and absolute! with their duties, responsibilities, and destinies.

Seeing, therefore, that the Indian (our American Indian, with whom we have now to do) has all the faculties—however defaced and blurred by long centuries of bloody crimes, which they regard not as crimes, but as virtues—seeing that these red, thriftless, bloody-minded Indians have all the human faculties intact—although, it may be, not so bright as those of some of our own people who call themselves Americans—is it not possible that by fair and manly dealing with them, by a just trade, and conscientious regard for the sanctity of treaty rights and obligations—that you, whom it may more particularly concern, might so win their good will as to make them friends instead of enemies? The devil that lies at the bottom of all savage natures is easily roused, not at all so easily laid again, and as easily kept in his own place. Indians are not incapable of friendship, nor of good faith, although the best require a great deal of looking after—and close looking, too! But what I want to urge is this: that if you always appeal to the worst passions of the redskin, rob him of his rights and property, cheat him by false promises, deceive him at all hands, and then mock him when he knocks at your door for credit or charity, that he and his may live, you cannot much wonder if, obeying his traditions, his religion, and the dictates of his savage nature—now maddened into fury and reckless of consequences—he indulges in the frightful havoc, the relentless murders and burnings, which have so lately marked his trail in Minnesota.

Let no one suppose for a moment, from what I have now said, that I design to offer any apology, any excuse for the nameless and unpunishable crimes which these miscreants have perpetrated. I have no pity and no compassion for them, and surely no word either which I desire should be construed, in this respect, to their favor. I go with the old Scotch judge—a rigid Antinomian! who, having tried and convicted a Calvinist as rigid as himself, asked him what he had to say why the sentence of the law should not be pronounced against him.

'My lord,' said the prisoner, 'it's a bad job; but I was predestined to do it!'

Whereupon his lordship replied: 'Ay! ay! my cannie laddie! an' I was predestined to hang ye for't.'

So while I set forth the necessary, evil nature of the Indian, and the consequent necessity of his bloody deeds, I also insist upon the necessity of hanging him for it.

I plead not for the Indian of Minnesota, after these most shocking, most appalling butcheries. I love my own race; and not a man, woman, or child, who was sacrificed by these monsters, but their wounds were my wounds, and their agonies tore my heart to the very core. Henceforth I shall never see an Indian but I shall feel the 'goose flesh' of loathing and horror steal over my Adam's buff! But you, my beloved friends of Minnesota! you who have suffered so much in your families and homes during the massacre, are you sure that you did all you could do as citizens and rulers in this land to see even-handed justice dealt out between the corrupt Government agencies and storekeepers, and the helpless Indians? Had these last no just and reasonable ground of complaint? complaint of the General Government, complaint of the delays in their payment, complaint of the swindling of the storekeepers and traders?

They had sold their lands, and gone away to their reservations. But the money for their lands—promised so faithfully at such a time—where was that money? Non est! The Indians depended on it, trusted to the certainty of its coming as the saint trusts in the promises. They came for it—often, in their history, in the depth of winter, for hundred of miles, through an inhospitable forest; their wives, children, and braves starving—many of them left behind in the wilderness to die; their only weapon made of coarse nails, lashed with wire, and this they called a gun barrel, and with this they killed what game was killed by the way.

This did not happen in Minnesota, it is true; but events as horrible and sickening as this did happen, and brought with them consequences more horrible still, which will never be forgotten while the State exists or the language lasts. Scenes were enacted at that 'Lower Agency' which were disgraceful to human nature, and the victims were invariably the redskins. Once when Red Iron came there, at the summons, or rather after the repeated summons of Governor Ramsay, it turned out that nearly four hundred thousand dollars of the cash payment due to the Sioux, under the treaties of 1851-'2, were paid to the traders on old indebtedness! How much of this enormous sum was really due to the traders it is bootless now to inquire; although it is pretty certain, from what we know of similar transactions, that not a twentieth part of it was due to them. Mr. Isaac V. D. Heard, who has written a 'History of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863,' who is an old resident of Minnesota of twelve years' standing, acted with General Sibley in his expedition against the savages in 1862, and was recorder of the military commission which tried some four hundred of the participants in the outbreak—has not been deterred by the just hatred which the Minnesota people nurture against the Indians, and which they will keep hot until their rifles have exterminated the whole brood of them, from saying a brave word respecting the iniquities perpetrated by rascal peddlers and official prigs against the Indians which were the immediate causes of the massacre and the subsequent wars.

The Indian was subjected to all sorts of frauds, little and big—the smaller thieves thinking that they also must live, no matter at whose expense, although I demur to the proposition. Why should they stop at stealing a thousand or two, more or less, while that four hundred thousand swindle leered at them so wickedly over the left shoulder, mocking at all law and justice, and scot free from all punishment? These 'traders' could charge what sums they liked against the Indian, and get them too; for there was no one to defeat or check their rapacity. Mr. Heard tells us that no less a sum than fifty-five thousand dollars was claimed by one Hugh Tyler, as due to him by the Indians, when the great swindle just alluded to was committed; and that he was paid out of the accruing funds. This man was a stranger in the country, an adventurer, who went out into the wilderness 'for to seek his fortune;' and it is curious to read the items of which his little bill, fifty-five thousand, is composed. Here they are: For getting the treaties through the Senate; for 'necessary disbursements' in securing the assent of the chiefs. Very curious and instructive items they are, to all who consider them. To say nothing of the corruption of the Senate which the first item signifies, if it has any meaning at all, there is the guilty record of the 'necessary disbursements,' or, in other words, bribes, paid to chiefs for betraying their country and their race. This was a part of the regular machinery of the Agencies. All their plans were cut and dried, and they had men to carry them out. They could not stir a peg without the assent of the chiefs; and when they found a man too noble to be a traitor, they got the Governor to break him as a chief, and invest a more pliable, accommodating redskin with his rank and title. Through the influence of bad men, and by the forging of lying documents, which the Indians could not read, and which were never interpreted to them except to cheat them as to their contents and meaning, they have always managed to get their treaties signed; after which the newly made chiefs could not so much as take the liberty to beg a pipe of tobacco of them.

As a sample of their infamous dealings, we take the following excerpt from Mr. Heard's book, page 41:

'In 1857, a trader, pretending that he was getting them to sign a power of attorney to get back the money which had gone to the traders under the treaty of 1851 and 1852, obtained their signatures to vouchers, by which he swindled them out of $12,000. Shortly after, this trader secured the payment of $4,500 for goods which he claimed (falsely, it is said) to have been stolen. About the same time a man in Sioux City was allowed a claim of $5,000 for horses, which he also alleged to have been stolen.