Religion and the Indian Wars

The frontier is central to the United States’ conception of its history and place in the world. It is an abstract concept that reflects the American mythos of progress and is rooted in religious ideas about land, labor, identity, and ownership. Throughout the nineteenth century, these ideas became more than just abstractions. They were tested, hardened, and revised by US officials and the soldiers they commanded on American battlefields. This process took the form of the Civil War and the series of U.S. military encounters with Native Americans known as the Indian Wars. These separate yet overlapping campaigns have had profound and lasting
consequences for the North American landscape and its peoples. This course explores the relationship between religious ideology and state violence in the last half of nineteenth century. Organized chronologically and geographically, we will engage with both primary sources and classic works in the historiography of the Indian Wars to examine how religion shaped federal policy and race relations from the start of the Civil War through approximately 1910.