Native Americans and North American History – Part 8

Native Americans and slavery.

The last three essays in this series will explore Native Americans’ deep but little-known involvement with slavery, of both Africans and other Native Americans.

Many people may not know that Native Americans owned slaves, too.  As explained by Barbara Krauthamer in her book Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South: “Native American tribes bought thousands of slaves, and joined as allies to the Confederacy during the Civil War -- and didn’t free their own slaves until a treaty with the United States required their freedom in 1866, a year after the Civil War ended slavery in the United States.”  As Krauthamer writes: “[A]pproximately 7,000 black people … had been enslaved and emancipated by a Native American master … This book is a study of slavery, emancipation, and freedom in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indian Nations that traces the intricate points of connections between the Indian nations and the United States.”

As Krauthamer writes:

In the early nineteenth century, Choctaw and Chickasaw men and women embraced the idea of acquiring black people as property, equating blackness with lifelong, hereditary, and degraded servitude … Slaveholding Choctaws and Chickasaws did not blindly adopt and imitate the racial ideology of their Euro-American neighbors in Mississippi but instead crafted and refined their own ideologies of racial identification and differentiation that reflected the particular social, economic, and political conditions of their time and place. Racial categories, which encompassed not only blackness but also conceptions of Indianness and whiteness, were never static but were made and remade from the late eighteenth century through the antebellum era.

Native Americans’ involvement with slavery became as much commercial as it did cultural:

Through much of the eighteenth century, Choctaw and Chickasaw men inserted themselves directly into the business of chattel slavery, working not only as slave catchers but also as traders in early iterations of the domestic slave trade, shuttling slaves between colonial entrepôts [trading centers] from New Orleans to Charleston … It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when Choctaw and Chickasaw men and women began thinking about themselves as potential slaveholders and Africans and African Americans as people they could own as property. It is clear, however, that by the turn of the eighteenth century, Choctaws and Chickasaws were less inclined to regard enslaved Africans and African Americans primarily as objects of negotiation in transactions with Euro-Americans and more likely to consider them as property to be accumulated, sold, and exploited for individual prosperity … Transactions between Choctaws, Chickasaws, and their white neighbors brought enslaved women and men into the Indian nations via the transatlantic slave trade, the inter-American slave trade, and the domestic slave trade. African-born women and men who disembarked from the fetid holds of slaving vessels to be sold in southern port cities such as Charleston were purchased by both Indian and Euro-American slaveholders. In the winter of 1805, for example, Cherokee slaveholder James Vann purchased a Guinean woman in Charleston who walked barefoot from the city to his estate in northwestern Georgia and lost her feet to frostbite as a result. An enslaved man described only as “a native of Africa” had been enslaved in Georgia before “several changes of masters” landed him in the hands of a Choctaw owner by 1821. In the 1830s, a Chickasaw slaveholder owned “an old African man.” Up to the Civil War, travelers and missionaries would document the presence of African- born slaves in Indian communities.

Southern Native Americans embraced ideologies of racial inferiority, excepting themselves of course, and this ideology was enshrined in Native American law:

While southern Indians may have dispensed with the aspects of the dominant American racial ideology that exalted white superiority and posited Indian inferiority, they firmly embraced a racial hierarchy that degraded blackness and associated it exclusively with enslavement … [Choctaw] [l]aws also addressed the issue of enslaved people’s ownership of property, stating that by the end of 1836, no “negro slaves shall be in possession of any property or arms,” and any property or arms seized from slaves would be auctioned for the benefit of the Choctaw Nation … Chickasaw laws, too, protected Chickasaws’ right to own slaves, prohibited slaves’ ownership of property, and barred anyone of African descent from citizenship, suffrage, and office holding in the Chickasaw Nation … Indian legislators condemned sexual relationships between Indians and black people and punished Choctaws and Chickasaws for “publicly tak[ing] up with a negro slave” with fines, whippings and, ultimately, expulsion from the nation.

Native Americans’ abuse of slaves followed, and became just as routine as it did elsewhere in the South:

Many slaves’ bodies bore the marks of whippings and physical abuse inflicted by Indian slaveholders and the white men they employed as overseers. In 1822 Choctaw slaveholder Anthony Turnbull “hired a white man to drive his negroes.” In 1824 the U.S. Indian agent posted in the Chickasaw Nation noted that white men were hired as overseers not only on large plantations but also on smaller farms, where they monitored and punished enslaved workers. Choctaw and Chickasaw planters did not rely exclusively on white overseers to direct and correct their slaves. When Peter Pitchlynn traveled away from his plantation, for example, he relied on his brother to manage his slaves and “whip them” if necessary. Ex-slaves Matilda Poe and Kiziah Love each spoke of owners who whipped and punished their slaves. With the expansion of chattel slavery in the southern Indian nations, slaveholders relied on violence as a routine means of punishment, and physical abuse became an uneventful daily occurrence in the lives of the enslaved and slaveholders … The violence and coercion leveled against enslaved people went largely unchecked beyond individual slaveholders’ calculations of the gains or losses that might be incurred as a result of bodily domination. Physical violence against slaves served not simply as a mode of correction but as a demonstration of slaveholders’ power and mastery. In 1816 the agent to the Chickasaws reported to his superiors that “several negroes have been lately murdered in this nation in a most barbarous, cruel, and unprovoked manner.” In one case, an Indian master killed one of his slaves and defended the attack by stating that he owned the slave and thus could kill him.

Because Native Americans did not recognize the ownership of land as private property, but they did recognize the ownership of slaves as private property, slaves became a significant portion of a Native American slaveowner’s wealth:

In the late 1820s and 1830s, Choctaws and Chickasaws relied on their government’s newly drafted legal code to protect their ownership of slaves, detailing the distribution of estates in their wills and pursuing complaints against their fellow citizens to clarify the rights of ownership. In the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, individuals did not own land as private property but instead claimed their improvements, along with household items and slaves, as personal possessions. In this context, slaves stood as a tremendously valuable form of property that usually represented a sizable investment and also promised significant returns.

When Choctaws were removed to other lands, slaves helped ease their journey:

Joe Nail … left Mississippi with his Choctaw owners, and Chaney Colbert moved west as property of the Chickasaw Colbert family. On the journey west, enslaved people’s labor shielded their owners from some of removal’s travails and facilitated the transport of the rest of their belongings. Enslaved men drove wagons loaded with household goods and tended horses and livestock while enslaved women prepared meals.

And the prospects for cotton-growing in the territories to which Choctaws were removed was seen as a potential economic boon for Native Americans who owned slaves:

In the years after their deportation from Mississippi to Indian Territory, many Choctaw and Chickasaw slaveholders sought to reestablish their wealth and prestige and deployed their slaves to build up extensive and profitable farms and plantations. Though both free and enslaved emigrants were buffeted by the hunger and disease that plagued removal, slaveholders in Indian Territory looked forward to better days. Toward the end of 1832, Choctaw slaveholder David Folsom led a removal party of nearly 1,000 people, including slaves, to an area near the Red River. By the spring of 1833, Folsom had already written back to John Pitchlynn in Mississippi, assuring him that the region was “cotton country.” U.S. Indian agents, too, were equally optimistic about Choctaw and Chickasaw slaveholders’ prospects for the future. In his 1836 report, one agent predicted that “the Red River part is destined soon to be a fine cotton-growing country” and expected a yield of some 500 bales of cotton that year. The following year’s report praised the “large quantities of cotton” grown on Red River plantations. Even when smallpox killed between 500 and 600 Chickasaw emigrants in 1838, the U.S. agent focused his attention on the likely economic success of Chickasaw and Choctaw cotton planters in the coming years. Polly Colbert, a former slave of the Chickasaw Colbert family, said of the early days in Indian Territory: “The land was first cleared up and worked by … slaves.”

Missionaries reported on the negative effects of slave ownership on Native Americans themselves:

Indians were perpetually at odds with missionaries over the issue of slavery. Human bondage did not accord with the missionaries’ vision of a Christian society. In their eyes, Indians’ ownership of slaves and reliance on their labor to generate food and commodity crops did not signal their warm embrace of American ideals of private property and market-oriented production. Instead, missionaries argued that slavery highlighted Native people’s laziness, cruelty, and resistance to “civilization.” Slavery, Kingsbury wrote in 1844, was “one of the greatest obstacles to the progress of the Gospel [and] civilization” in the Indian nations. In subsequent correspondence, Kingsbury elaborated on the subject of Indians as slaveholders, writing: “The indolent slave of an indolent, ignorant Indian ... is an unfortunate being … Negroes raised in the states & especially those raised under the Gospel are much more intelligent & industrious than those raised among the Indians.”

As Wilfred Reilly writes:

This plain historical fact of common, brutal Native American slaveholding is so undisputed—among serious people—that some writers have argued it “complicates” the standard narratives around anti-Native atrocities like the Trail of Tears. “When you think of the Trail,” says Smithsonian magazine’s Ryan P. Smith, in a reported piece on a symposium at the National Museum of the American Indian, you probably envision “a long procession of suffering Cherokee Indians forced westward by a villainous Andrew Jackson.” The symposium, which focused on “intersectional African-American and Native American history,” posited that this imagined vision was too simplistic. A historically literate observer of the same imaginary tableau might guess that the Indian removal federal policy “was not simply the vindictive scheme of Andrew Jackson, but rather a popularly endorsed, congressionally sanctioned campaign spanning the administrations of nine separate presidents.” What you most likely do not imagine, the Smithsonian summarized, “are Cherokee slaveholders . . . [and] the numerous African-American slaves, Cherokee-owned, who made the brutal march themselves, or else were shipped en masse to what is now Oklahoma ... by their wealthy Indian masters.” However, that ugly latter image would have depicted one of the most obvious and striking realities of the Trail: Civilized Tribes Natives owned tens of thousands of slaves, and most of them were frog-marched to the Middle West by their owners. Comanche author and museum curator Paul Chaat Smith, quoted in the Smithsonian piece, points out that “the ... tribes were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized Black codes, immediately reestablished slavery when they arrived in Indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.” … [T]he Smithsonian piece goes on to make an absolutely essential observation about history and historical analysis, summarizing Paul Chaat Smith and Harvard professor Tyra Miles’s argument: “American history is explained poorly by modern morality but effectively by simple economics and power dynamics.” This thesis, while obviously true, is rarely stated so bluntly, and often seems nearly taboo to express in public.

In the next essay in this series, we’ll look at how and why Native Americans in the South sided with the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War.

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.