Native Americans and North American History – Part 9
Southern Native Americans sided with the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War.
Native Americans enslaved other Native Americans. As explained by Barbara Krauthamer in her book Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South:
British and French traders obtained Indian slaves by tapping into existing indigenous practices of raiding and captive taking … Choctaws and Chickasaws had long seized male and female captives during wartime as a means of obtaining spiritual and physical replacements for loved ones lost in war. Like other Native peoples, such as the Cherokees, Choctaws and Chickasaws usually put male captives to death after a period of ritualized torture. On one occasion in 1752, for example, Choctaws whipped a captive Chickasaw warrior for three days and planned on burning him to death on the fourth day, but he escaped. In the same year, Chickasaws tortured two captive Choctaw warriors “in a most barbarous Manner, takeing of their Scalps and cutting out their Bowels before they were dead.” … British officials in Carolina armed and rewarded Chickasaw and Creek war parties for destroying Choctaw settlements and turning over Choctaw captives for enslavement in the British colonies. In 1708 Carolina trader and diplomat Thomas Nairne found that the Chickasaws enjoyed “the Greatest Ease” taking enemy captives to “get a Booty” from the British. French authorities, in turn, compensated Choctaws for the Indian captives they seized. In 1721, for example, during a period of warfare between Choctaw and Chickasaw settlements, Louisiana authorities sought “to incite [Choctaw warriors] to do well” by paying handsomely for every Chickasaw scalp and each of “the slaves that they bring in.” Chickasaw and Choctaw warriors targeted any number of indigenous peoples within an approximately 200-mile radius of their settlements in northeastern and central-eastern Mississippi. These slaving expeditions wreaked havoc on indigenous communities, disrupting local economic and demographic stability and precipitating lasting changes in the organization of local and regional populations … According to historian Alan Gallay, an estimated 24,000 to 51,000 Indians, including approximately 2,000 Choctaws, were sold into the British slave trade between 1670 and 1715. During this period, Carolina enjoyed a lively trade in Indian slaves, as the number of the colony’s exported Indian slaves exceeded the number of its imported African slaves.
Native Americans’ enslavement of blacks grew out of their own traditions of enslaving other Native Americans, but was also accompanied by negative racial views against blacks leading up to the U.S. Civil War. As explained by Krauthamer:
By the 1840s, proslavery ideology hardened in the Indian nations, creating a climate of animosity toward all black people, especially those who were free. Indian law and custom unequivocally linked blackness with servitude and defined citizenship in terms of race, effectively making free black people social and civic anomalies … The Choctaw General Council enacted legislation in October 1840 that mandated the expulsion of all free black people “unconnected with the Choctaw & Chickasaw blood” by March 1841; those who remained in the nation risked being sold at auction and enslaved for life. The law also criminalized the hiring or harboring of free black people and barred free black people from the United States from entering the nation, imposing fines ranging from $250 to $500 or fifty lashes on the bare back. Finally, the law included a provision that called for the arrest of black people who were merely suspected of being free and imposed on them (or their masters) the burden of proving their slave status. This provision empowered lighthorsemen (police) and citizens to use violence and even deadly force, if necessary, when taking a suspected free black person into custody. An 1846 law forbade masters from manumitting their slaves without presenting the case to the [Choctaw] General Council for approval. Manumitted slaves were given thirty days to leave the nations and risked arrest and five years enslavement if they returned.
The involvement of Native Americans in the slave trade leading up to and during the U.S. Civil War is not well known:
Indian Territory rarely, if ever, appears in studies of the U.S. sectional crisis and the fights over slavery’s westward expansion. Yet it is clear that enslaved people’s resistance efforts in the 1850s and Indian slaveholders’ responses were bound up in the mounting crisis over slavery. Slaves and slaveholders in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations understood the ways their lives could be changed by events in the states, and they also recognized the moments when they might alter the course of things through their own actions.
But the involvement of Native Americans in slave-trading is not surprising considering the importance of cotton to many Native American slaveowners:
On the eve of the Civil War, Choctaw Robert Jones owned at least 227 slaves and operated four plantations that stretched across this region. Some estimates put the number of slaves owned by Jones closer to 500, which would have made him one of the largest slaveholders in Indian Territory and the United States. By the 1850s, a growing number of slaves could also be found on newly established plantations farther north, close to the Arkansas River in Skullyville County. In 1846 the U.S. Indian Agent found that the more prosperous Choctaw and Chickasaw planters had “most excellent cotton gins” and had little difficulty selling “their produce” in the neighboring states … So thoroughly had slavery and cotton infused the society that Chickasaws named their county with the largest number of plantations, cotton gins, and steamboat landings “Panola,” a variant of “ponola,” the Chickasaw word for “thread” and Choctaw word for “cotton.” … The development of cotton plantations and other commercial agricultural and livestock enterprises in the unified Choctaw/Chickasaw Nation paralleled the growth of cotton agriculture in the Creek and Cherokee Nations. Historian David Chang explains that the proliferation of individually operated farms and plantations in the Creek Nation rested squarely on a widening notion of “private ownership of land-use rights.” Among Cherokees, likewise, daily practices and legal definitions of land use shifted to permit and protect the ability of individuals and families to acquire and claim land for their personal benefit. Similar changes were also under way among Choctaws and Chickasaws. The privatization of land use among Indians expanded and became increasingly profitable after removal as slaveholders heightened their demands and control of slaves’ productive and reproductive labor. In just under three decades, from the era of removal to the eve of the Civil War, the enslaved population grew considerably. The birth of enslaved babies and the importation of enslaved people purchased from the United States combined to increase the enslaved population of the Choctaw/Chickasaw Nation. To characterize the growth of the enslaved population as “natural increase” is to miss the commodification, if not coercion, underlying enslaved women’s reproduction. “The stock and negroes are doing and increasing finely … our horses, hogs and negroes look the fattest and sleakest [sic] of all the horses and negroes in the country,” wrote Lycurgus Pitchlynn to his father.
Choctaw and Chickasaw slaveholders became increasingly concerned with their ability to prevent the movement of their slaves out-of-state. As Banner writes:
By the 1850s, Choctaw and Chickasaw slaveholders shifted some of their individual authority over their slaves, especially over slaves’ mobility, to their national government. Adding to the existing body of laws governing slavery, lawmakers expanded the right to control slaves’ movement beyond individual slaveholders by creating patrols and requiring slaves to carry written passes. An 1848 law punished slaves “found at such assemblies or strolling about from one plantation to another without a pass from his master mistress or overseer” with up to ten lashes on the bare back. The punishment could be inflicted either by the lighthorsemen or any citizen of the nation … A few years later, after the Chickasaws reestablished their independent government, Chickasaw legislators enacted their own legal code that directly addressed a number of issues related to slavery. One law made it illegal to harbor or “clandestinely support” runaway slaves and appropriated funds to pay a jailor, who would be responsible for keeping captured runaways or other disorderly slaves in custody. During the Chickasaw legislature’s October 1857 session, payments were authorized to Sheriff Ad-koutch-an Tubby and S. Colbert for holding slaves under arrest. Slaveholders were required to give slaves written passes to travel. County judges were directed to assemble patrols in the areas where such a policing mechanism would be most “useful.” It was expected that the patrol would ride three nights per week, and patrollers had the authority to establish their own rules, such as determining how long a pass was valid. Slaves caught without a pass would be punished with thirty-nine lashes on the bare back. According to ex-slaves, such measures proved effective. Matilda Poe indicated that few slaves left Isaac Love’s plantation because of the “patrollers.” Polly Colbert said that “patrollers” basically functioned as policemen, and that she was afraid of them. Kiziah Love remembered that slaveholder Buck Colbert rode with patrols who regularly stopped black people on the road and demanded to see their passes, telling them “they had stayed over time” and “didn’t have any business off the farm and to git back there and stay there.”
As will be explored in the next and last essay in this series, slaveholding Native Americans in the South were primed to support the Confederacy when the Civil War began.
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.