“More Conscience Than Force”: U.S. Indian Inspector William Vandever, Grant's Peace Policy, and Protestant Whiteness

Abstract

William Vandever (1817–1893) served as a U.S. Indian inspector from 1873 until early 1878. A lawyer by profession, Vandever had been a Republican congressman from Iowa and a Civil War officer. (Later, he would return to Congress, representing California.). While serving with the Indian Office, he became a critic of the militarization of federal Indian policy, so much so as to be reprimanded and not reappointed. His experience enables a reconsideration of President U.S. Grant's peace policy in at least two areas. First, as one of a new group of Office of Indian Affairs officials, Vandever provides a view of federal Indian policy from the middle level of the federal bureaucracy during the 1870s. His case especially illustrates his bureau's attempts to centralize civilian management of Indian reservations. Second, Vandever's policy criticisms, though they assumed white American “civilization” as normative, more immediately arose from his religious perspective. Although he lost his post, Vandever serves to highlight the privileged role of white Protestantism during Grant's peace policy. He exemplified a set of racialized religious sensibilities that were important at the time and that could be termed Protestant whiteness.