Native American policy of the Ulysses S. Grant administration

President Ulysses S. Grant sympathized with the plight of Native Americans and believed that the original occupants of the land were worthy of study. Grant's Inauguration Address set the tone for the Grant administration Native American Peace policy.^[1] The Board of Indian Commissioners was created to make reforms in Native policy and to ensure Native tribes received federal help. Grant lobbied the United States Congress to ensure that Native peoples would receive adequate funding. The hallmark of Grant's Peace policy was the incorporation of religious groups that served on Native agencies, which were dispersed throughout the United States.

Grant was the first President of the United States to appoint a Native American, Ely S. Parker, as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. After the Piegan massacre, in 1870, military officers were barred from holding elected or appointed offices. During Grant's first term, American Indian Wars decreased. By the end of his second term, his Peace policy fell apart. Settlers demanded to invade Native land to get access to gold in the Black Hills. The Modoc War (1872–1873) and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876), were detrimental to Grant's goal of enforced Native assimilation to European American culture and society.

Historians admire Grant's sincere efforts to improve Native relations in the United States but remain critical of the destruction of buffalo herds, which served as a tribal food supply. Native American culture was destroyed in order to engineer the cultural assimilation of Native Americans into citizenship, and European American culture and government. Detrimental to his Peace policy was religious agency infighting in addition to Parker's resignation in 1871. Grant's intentions of peacefully "civilizing" Natives were often in conflict with the nation's westward settlement, the pursuit of gold, the Long Depression (1873-1896), financial corruption, racism, and ranchers. The driving force behind the Peace policy and Native land displacement, was the American ideal of Manifest Destiny. The primary goal of Grant's Indian policy was to have Native Americans assimilated into white culture, education, language, religion, and citizenship, that was designed to break Indian reliance on their own tribal, nomadic, hunting, and religious lifestyles. Some Grant biographers argue that Grant’s Indian policies were well-intentioned, while others argue his assimilationist policies were rooted in destroying Native American culture in the fulfilment of Manifest Destiny.^[2]