Howard after the Civil
War.
Even in battle Howard was as much a moral crusader as a
warrior, insisting that his troops attend prayer and
temperance meetings. After the war, he was appointed head of
the Freedman's Bureau, which was designed to protect and
assist the newly-freed slaves. In this position, Howard
quickly earned the contempt of white Southerners and many
Northerners for his unapologetic support of black suffrage
and his efforts to distribute land to African-Americans. He
was also fearlessly candid about expressing his belief that
the majority of white Southerners would be happy to see
slavery restored. He even championed freedom and equality
for former slaves in his private life, by working to make
his elite Washington, D.C., church racially integrated and
by helping to found an all-black college in the District of
Columbia, which was soon named Howard University in his
honor. In 1872, Howard brought a similar courage and sense
of commitment to the American West when he was dispatched by
the Grant administration to meet with the Chiricahua Apache
leader Cochise and bring an end to his decade-long guerilla
war against American settlers. Travelling almost alone,
Howard entered the Apache chief's stronghold and secured a
peace agreement by promising him a reservation of his own
choosing. Other generals and public officials condemned what
they saw as the overly generous terms of this agreement, but
Howard's promise was upheld by an executive order which set
aside nearly the whole southeastern corner of the Arizona
Territory as a Chiricahua reservation on which Cochise and
his people could live with little meddling from the army.
Five years later, in 1877, Howard faced a different
situation in Oregon, where he was sent to persuade a Nez
Percé band led by Chief Joseph to leave their
homeland in the Wallowa Valley for the reservation assigned
to them in Lapwai, Idaho. Howard found himself agreeing with
Joseph that his people had never signed a treaty giving up
their homeland, but in Howard's view this did not change the
fact that eastern Oregon was no longer a place where Indians
could roam free. After his offer to purchase the valley was
rejected, Howard made it clear that he would use force to
move the Nez Percé as he had been commanded. And
despite his sympathies for Joseph's band, he did not
hesitate to send his troops against them when Nez
Percé warriors killed several white settlers in the
area. Nonetheless, Howard never lost sight of the underlying
moral issue in this confrontation, and after Joseph's
surrender, he was outspoken among those officers who argued
without success that his band should be allowed to return to
their home. Howard's military career after the Nez
Percé War included serving as superintendent of West
Point for several years and as the commanding officer of the
Department of the Platte and the Division of the East. In
his later years and after his retirement from the army in
1894, he wrote several books on military and Indian affairs,
including Nez Percé Joseph (1881), Autobiography
(1907), My Life and Experiences Among Hostile Indians (1907)
and Famous Indian Chiefs I Have Known (1908). Howard died in
1909.
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