UC Davis

In the immediate aftermath of the Sand Creek Massacre and a series of military conflicts with Indigenous peoples in the West, the United States Congress organized a joint special committee led by Wisconsin Senator James R. Doolittle in March 1865. Consisting of three Senators and four members of the House, the Doolittle Committee set out to inquire about “the conditions of the Indian tribes and their treatment by the civil and military authorities of the United States” in the Western territories. This article focuses on the experiences and debates surrounding the Doolittle Committee from 1865 to 1867 and, more broadly, the post-Civil War shifts in federal-Indian relations. Using Congressional documents, territorial newspapers, and personal writings, this article analyzes the objectives and experiences of the Doolittle Committee, the impacts of their findings on subsequent congressional commissions such as the Peace Commission, and the contested visions of settling the West after the Civil War. I argue that informed by postbellum reform movements, Doolittle and his colleagues initiated a significant, albeit short-lived, shift in federal-tribal relations. They imagined a possible future of these relations that had the potential to be more just and peaceful and projected an alternative vision of a righteous American empire. In examining the Doolittle Committee, this article joins historians of U.S. empire in emphasizing the contentious nature of postbellum U.S. imperial expansion. The workings of the Committee also offer insights into the non-linear trajectory of federal-Indian relations in the second half of the nineteenth century and demonstrate that the shifts in late-nineteenth-century evangelical reforms were already underway in the mid-1860s.