Native Americans and North American History – Part 10
Native Americans sided with the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War, continued.
Slaveholding Native Americans in the South were primed to support the Confederacy when the Civil War began. As explained by Barbara Krauthamer in her book Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South:
Choctaw and Chickasaw diplomats in Washington, D.C., urged their lawmakers back home to remain neutral regarding the impending crisis [the U.S. Civil War]. Nonetheless, legislators quickly adopted resolutions averring their support of the Confederacy because “natural affections” and “social and domestic institutions” united Choctaws and Chickasaws with their “Southern friends” and “brethren.” … On June 12, 1861, the nations entered a treaty with the Confederacy that dispensed with genteel euphemisms and directly addressed the subject of slavery. It confirmed the legality of chattel slavery and extended the Fugitive Slave Law to the nations, requiring the return of runaway slaves from the Confederacy and pledging to return any runaways from the Indian nations. When the Choctaw and Chickasaw governments allied with the Confederacy in the summer of 1861, they severed their nations’ existing treaty relations with the Union.
Southern Native Americans’ interest in preserving slavery and their own autonomy was intertwined, just as it was for the Southern states that seceded from the Union:
Nearly a century of scholarship has assessed the causes and reasoning that compelled the Indian nations to enter treaty relations with the Confederacy. At issue in much of the discussion is the extent to which allying with the South either signaled the Indian nations’ commitment to the racial ideology of chattel slavery or marked a nationalist strategy to preserve Indian sovereignty. Yet the two cannot be disentangled. Protecting sovereignty was also protecting slavery. The resolution adopted by the Chickasaw legislature in May 1861 suggests as much. After criticizing Lincoln and the federal government for withdrawing Union troops from Indian Territory and withholding the payment of annuity moneys, the resolution affirmed the “feelings and sympathies” that joined the Chickasaw Nation to the Confederacy. The Union’s war of “conquest and confiscation,” furthermore, threatened to unleash a tidal wave of slave insurrections that would rival “San Domingo in atrocious horrors.”
Even after the Confederacy was defeated, Southern Native Americans continued to hold slaves as long as possible, as they were members of sovereign tribes and not directly bound by any obligations placed upon the Confederate states:
For the enslaved men and women in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, the end of the Civil War offered little reason for jubilation. Unlike their Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole counterparts, Choctaw and Chickasaw lawmakers did not abolish slavery either during or at the close of the war. The Union victory in the states did not automatically precipitate the abolition of slavery in the politically autonomous Indian nations, nor did it immediately restore treaty relations between the United States and Indian allies of the Confederacy. Months after the war’s end and slavery’s demise in the United States, Choctaw and Chickasaw lawmakers remained hesitant about declaring the end of chattel slavery and refused to contemplate the possibility of legally and socially redefining people of African descent as something other than slaves.
A year after the end of the Civil War, the Choctaw and Chickasaw, driven by a desire for trade with the victorious Union, entered into a treaty abolishing slavery in their respective sovereign territories, but its terms weren’t concrete enough to provide former slaves of Native Americans a clear and easy path to freedom:
Finally, in the spring of 1866, the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, despite having separate governments, entered a joint treaty between themselves and began negotiations with the United States. The agreement with the United States abolished slavery in the two nations and presented a convoluted set of provisions regarding black people’s legal freedom and civic status in the nations … Black people in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations waited longer than most before gaining their freedom and a clear picture of their future … Though the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Nations had allied with the Confederacy, they were not recognized as states in the Confederacy, leaving their governments and laws effectively untouched by General Lee’s surrender … In the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, … the central point of contention in the months after the war ended was not resolving how black people’s freedom would be defined. Rather, the question was whether the nations would abolish slavery and establish black people’s freedom at all. These issues emerged as key points in the negotiations that culminated in the 1866 treaty that restored formal relations between the United States and the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations … When they allied with the Confederacy in 1861, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Nations severed their respective treaty relationships with the United States. In 1865, consequently, each of the Indian nations had to negotiate new treaties with the United States; the Choctaws and Chickasaws entered a joint treaty. Preliminary agreements in September 1865 and the final treaties in 1866 called for the abolition of slavery and the extension of citizenship to freed slaves in the Indian nations, effectively expanding Reconstruction to Indian Territory … Prominent among the United States’ demands were the creation of a single territorial government, the abolition of slavery, and the “incorporation [of freedpeople] into the tribes on an equal footing with the original members, or suitably provided for.” The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee had debated this explicit language of equality while drafting the Thirteenth Amendment and ultimately struck it from the final text. Its inclusion in the proposed treaty likely reflects [Secretary of the Interior John] Harlan’s views on the subject of black people’s rights as free people; Harlan was among the Iowa Republicans who endorsed black men’s suffrage as early as 1866. Still, the treaty offered no further guidelines on the subject of freedpeople’s status or rights in the Indian nations.
The Choctaws entered the treaty resistant to the end:
Robert M. Jones, a wealthy Choctaw planter who owned over 200 slaves, headed the Choctaw and Chickasaw Confederate delegation. He delivered an opening statement to [Commissioner of Indian Affair Dennis] Cooley that historian Clara Sue Kidwell describes as breathtakingly defiant. Jones maintained that the Choctaws believed the southern cause was “just” and that the two Indian nations had sided with the Confederacy to safeguard “our independence and national identity.” The Choctaw and Chickasaw delegation acknowledged U.S. authority over slavery in the nations but took the position that the subject was “open to further negotiation.” In the end, the Fort Smith council simply restored diplomatic relations between the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations and the United States but did not produce a formal treaty, leaving open myriad questions about the status of some 5,000 enslaved people in the two Indian nations.
The result was that blacks in Choctaw and Chickasaw territories were subject to the equivalent of the Black Codes of the Southern states:
After the Fort Smith council adjourned, Choctaw and Chickasaw lawmakers considered measures that would abolish slavery but preserve its social and economic subordination of black people. Though Choctaw slaveholders had “abandon[ed]” their property rights in slaves, Peter Pitchlynn, then the nation’s principal chief, explained they expected that black people’s freedom would nonetheless “be consistent with the rights of their late owners.” What emerged was a set of regulations that functioned like the Black Codes adopted in the southern states. On October 14, 1865, the Choctaw General Council decreed that “such persons as have to the present time, been considered as slaves” could either remain with their former masters or select a new employer and then enter into a written labor contract. Wages were set by a standardized schedule divided by ability into eight ranks, including children, but undistinguished by gender. The law not only coerced freedpeople into farmwork but also positioned them as sharecroppers by specifying that their wages would be the first lien on the crop. Vagrants, those former slaves without such contracts, were liable to arrest by the Choctaw lighthorsemen who would auction them to the highest bidder … While Indian lawmakers implemented their plans for dismantling slavery, Robert Looman and other black refugees from the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations approached U.S. military personnel for assistance. Slavery continued unabated, they complained. Not only did thousands of black people remain in bondage, but those who had freed themselves during the war risked capture and reenslavement. In September 1865, for example, Choctaw Michael Leflore kidnapped four men who had run away from his plantation to Arkansas during the war. Leflore brought the men back to his plantation, where they were tied up, beaten, and informed that they, as well as Leflore’s other slaves, were not free. One of the kidnapped men escaped from Leflore’s custody and brought the matter to the [United States] Freedmen’s Bureau. Black people protested to bureau officers that those who “claim their freedom” were threatened and abused. They informed the authorities that the Choctaws and Chickasaws equivocated as to the freedpeople’s status in the nations and that black people were subjected to violent and often fatal assaults … The Chickasaws’ conduct was reportedly even more egregious. In that nation, [John] Sanborn [special commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau] explained, the black people were still held as slaves, and the Chickasaws “entertain[ed] a bitter prejudice against them all.” … Only former slaves in the Seminole Nation seemed unimpeded in the enjoyment of their rights as citizens in the years after the Civil War … From the 1870s onward, Choctaw and Chickasaw leaders increasingly employed a rhetoric of domination when discussing the subject of freedpeople’s citizenship and the potential role of the federal government in resolving the matter. When Congress debated various bills that would have provided financial relief to freedpeople in the two Indian nations and effectively recognize them as citizens of the nations, Choctaw and Chickasaw spokesmen cast their nations as the victims of U.S. domination and force.
Only at the tail end of the United States’ Indian removal policies did the Choctaw and Chickasaw get serious about recognizing the citizenship of former black slaves:
Yet it was only when the United States made its final push to dismantle Indian governments and land title in Indian Territory that the issues of black people’s citizenship status and rights in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations were finally addressed by Choctaw, Chickasaw, and U.S. lawmakers.
As Krauthamer summarizes:
From the late eighteenth century through the end of the U.S. Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw men and women held people of African descent in slavery. Like their white southern counterparts, Indians bought, sold, owned, and exploited black people’s labor and reproduction for economic and social gain. Choctaws and Chickasaws purchased slaves -- men, women, and children -- to work on their Mississippi farms and plantations and to serve in their homes. Slaveholders and those who did not own slaves embraced a racial ideology that affirmed black people’s inherent difference and inferiority and thus justified their enslavement. Whether they owned only a few slaves, rented a slave for seasonal labor, or operated a large plantation with hundreds of slaves, Choctaws and Chickasaws understood that slavery allowed for the accumulation of personal wealth. Enslaved people cleared and plowed fields, hauled logs, drained swamps, planted and harvested crops, drove wagons, built homes, wove fabric, sewed clothes, cooked meals, and cared for Indian children, all for their masters’ benefit. Choctaws and Chickasaws purchased slaves in private transactions with other slaveholders and at public venues in cities such as New Orleans, conducting their business with white traders and slaveholders as well as with other Indians … [E]thnohistorians have treated slavery principally as a mechanism that facilitated cultural continuities without giving serious consideration to the dramatic changes necessarily embedded in the purchase and ownership of black people as property. In such analyses, scholars argue that acquiring slaves allowed Indian men to refrain from fieldwork -- historically the province of Native women. Men could pursue new market-oriented endeavors, such as the cultivation of commodity crops like corn and cotton, but remain true to the old ways in which men did not play central roles in agriculture … By the end of the eighteenth century, Choctaw and Chickasaw slaveholders, as well as those who did not own slaves, came to embrace those elements of Euro-American racial ideologies that identified people of African descent as an inherently and permanently inferior group. Among Choctaws and Chickasaws, racial identification and status -- slave or free -- were largely synonymous. Racial chattel slavery in the antebellum Indian nations was not simply a more-extreme variant of older indigenous practices of holding war captives as subordinates and servants. War captives -- Indians captured by other Indians -- were held in servitude only temporarily and were ultimately executed or incorporated into their captors’ communities. Black slaves, by contrast, were held in lifelong and hereditary bondage. Racial identity and status passed from mother to child … Choctaw and Chickasaw slaveholders clearly embraced a racial and gender ideology of black inferiority that informed their relationships with each other, with their slaves, and also with nonslaveholding Indians. Their adoption of this racial ideology in some ways aligned their social and economic interests with those of their white neighbors. Both Indian and white slaveholders sought to maintain a social and economic order premised on the commodification and degradation of black people’s bodies and labor … Recognizing the presence and participation of Native actors, communities, and nations in southern slavery, for example, challenges images of the South as an exclusively white-dominated space … The dense web of issues and people linking the Indian nations to the U.S. South during the period of the sectional crisis becomes most evident with the Choctaws’ and Chickasaws’ 1861 alliance with the Confederacy … The Choctaw and Chickasaw governments, unlike their Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole counterparts, did not abolish slavery at the close of the war. Because the Indian nations existed as autonomous political entities, Union victory did not automatically liberate black people from bondage. Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution applied to Indian Territory. Only in the course of negotiating a new treaty with the United States during the spring of 1866 did Choctaw and Chickasaw leaders grudgingly consent to acknowledge slavery’s demise and affirm the emancipation of slaves in their nations … Slavery finally came to an end in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations in 1866, when the two nations entered a joint treaty with the United States … Black people struggled for some four decades to secure their status and rights as citizens in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. This seemingly bizarre fact has fascinated many scholars but has not been explored in depth in the current historiography.
This concludes this series of essays on Native Americans and North American history.
Complete list of essays in this series: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10.