On April 11, 1873, General Edward Canby was murdered by Modoc Indians. The word “murdered” is correct as he killed during peace negotiations, under a flag of truce, which is a crime under international law. Americans then were outraged about this, but General Beale (Truxtun’s father), at the risk of losing friends and his reputation, offered some perspective. What follows is a passage from Edward Fitzgerald Beale, a Pioneer in the Path of Empire, 1822-1903, which I am currently reading:

It required courage to tell the truth concerning the treatment of the Modocs which provoked their uprising, especially at a moment when the whole country was in mourning for the gallant Canby. It required courage and it meant unpopularity, but without hesitation General Beale stepped into the breach with the following letter, which was first published in The Republican of Chester, Pennsylvania, on April 25, 1873. It was widely copied throughout the country and helped to steady public opinion with the result that a more civilized view of the situation was taken by the Government. It was the last signal service that Beale was able to render his former wards. He did it cheerfully, though it cost him many friends in and out of the army.

General Beale’s letter reads:

In the heat of a great popular excitement caused by the loss of a most useful and exemplary officer, it is very doubtful if a fair judgment can be had in relation to the causes which have produced the event we all deplore. General Canby had served his country with such efficient zeal in two great wars, and was possessed of so many of the virtues which attached him to the community, that the intelligence of his death was received as a shock by the whole people of the United States. Perhaps there was not in the entire army a man whose public and private character stood so high, or who was more generally and justly beloved, and the manner of his death has added to the public grief a sentiment of bitterness toward the Indians which it seems nothing but their extermination will satisfy. With but few exceptions the press of the country is eagerly demanding blood for blood.

Let us pause for a moment before committing ourselves to a policy more savage and remorseless than that of the Modocs whom we propose to smite hip and thigh. Let us ask ourselves if we are not reaping what we have sown, and if the treachery to which the gallant and lamented Canby fell a victim is not the repetition of a lesson which we ourselves have taught these apt scholars, the Indians? Are we to think ourselves blameless when we recall the Chivington massacre? In that affair the Indians were invited to council under flags of truce, and the rites of hospitality, sacred even among the Bedouins of the desert, were violated as well as all military honor, for these poor wretches, while eating the sacred bread and salt, were ruthlessly fallen upon and slaughtered to the last man. The Piegan massacre was another affair in which we industriously taught the uncultivated savages the value of our pledges; and if we are correctly informed the very beginning of the Modoc war was an attempt while in the act of council to which they had been invited to make Captain Jack and two others prisoners. As to the bloody character of Indian warfare, as far as we can see, it is carried on by us with about the same zeal.

We read of a sergeant in the service of the United States who in the late attack on the Modocs “took the scalp of Scar-face Charley who was found wounded in the lava beds.” And if we desire to feel very good and free from barbarism we have only to read what comes to us side by side with news from the Modocs of the humane and civilized treatment we are meting out to our brothers in Louisiana, who differ from us on political questions; or recall the massacre and robbery and mutilation of unoffending Chinese, which was committed in broad daylight by, American citizens in California a year or so ago.

The Modoc Indians are fighting for a right to live where God created them. The whole testimony of their neighbors when the war against them was first talked about, is to the effect that they were intelligent and inoffensive; and we have exasperated them by insisting on our right, which they do not see, to remove them to a distant and unknown country. Having been taught by us a violation of flags of truce, they have followed our example, and unhappily a noble victim to our teaching of falsehood and crime is the result; whereupon there goes out a cry of extermination throughout the land.

We enter our protest against this course, and we ask for justice and a calmer consideration by the public, of the Indian affairs of our country. We cannot restore the good men who have been killed, by an indiscriminate slaughter of all the tribe of the Modocs; and it does not become a Christian people to hunt to death the poor remnant of those from whom we have already taken the broad acres of thirty-seven states of this Union.

One of the things I have noticed about General Beale and his son is that they were not afraid to offend people if they believed that they were in the right. It sort of reminds me of how some people said that Ron Paul was “blaming America” for 9/11. No country is perfect, because every country is made up of imperfect people. The most important part is the be honest about our shortcomings, with the hope that we can all improve.