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The Cherokee Nation in the Civil War
By Clarissa W. Confer UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2007 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-8466-1
CHAPTER 1
Prelude to War
The Cherokee Nation hereby cede relinquish and convey to the United States all the lands owned claimed or possessed by them east of the Mississippi River.
CHEROKEE TREATY OF 1835
The American Civil War began in 1861, but its roots lay much deeper in the country's past. The storm that broke upon Lincoln's election in November of 1860 had been brewing for decades. Legislation such as the Missouri Compromise attempted to patch over the growing differences between economies based on free and slave labor, though to little avail. Thomas Jefferson's "fire bell in the night" had at last begun to sound. The bloodshed of the war had even been foreshadowed in the sectional violence that wracked "Bleeding Kansas" in the 1850s. The Civil War in Indian Territory followed a similar path; the outbreak of war followed decades of tension and transition. Residents of the Cherokee Nation had split over issues in the past and would do so again. The ongoing transformation which so tested the strength of the Indian nation resulted both from the Native society's own development and its forced interaction with Euro-American culture. Contacts with whites aggravated and prolonged internal divisions within Native communities. These divisions had a powerful influence on the reaction of the nation to the sectional crisis.
The removal policy of the United States government in the early nineteenth century was one of the greatest challenges to tribal unity and sovereignty faced by American Indians. The idea of moving Native people out of areas inhabited by whites certainly was not new in the nineteenth century. Thomas Jefferson had envisioned enclaves or reservations in the West to hold primitive people until they could achieve a sufficient level of civilization to be fit neighbors for industrious yeoman farmers. Indeed, the Southeastern Indian Nations had already signed numerous treaties yielding their eastern land to the expanding population of white southerners. What differed in the 1820s and 1830s was the virulence of the attacks against Indian sovereignty and land ownership. This intense offensive gained power from the attitude of the president of the United States. Andrew Jackson was indissolubly linked to Indian removal, and his election in 1828 sounded a death knell for Native sovereignty.
Jackson developed an unusual and somewhat ambiguous relationship with Native people. Although once a military ally of the Cherokee (he fought with them at the battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814), President Jackson favored personal and political expediency over loyalty to former comrades by supporting southern interests determined to remove Native inhabitants. Georgia initiated an aggressive campaign to rid itself of the Cherokees. Tactics included disavowing tribal sovereignty by extending state laws over Indian land and annexing the territory into the state. White southerners regarded the state's actions as a license to disregard Native landholding rights. They blatantly moved onto Cherokee land, seized improvements, and in general terrorized Native inhabitants. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 put the weight of the federal government behind state efforts. The Office of Indian Affairs, the federally mandated protector of Native rights, championed the cause of removal through its agents.
Removal sparked deep divisions within the Cherokee Nation. The split was bitter, long-lasting, and directly related to the division of the nation during the Civil War. The trauma of civil strife engendered by the removal crisis left fissures in the community that would open again in a few decades. As the federal government increased pressure on the nation, two distinct groups emerged. The majority of the tribe adamantly opposed removal, and Principal Chief John Ross and his followers pledged to uphold the will of the majority. Many of those opposed to relinquishing their homelands were traditionalists and probably hereditarily Cherokee; their political power, however, was vested in the elites holding tribal offices. This reflected the core of Native politics—rule by consensus. Ross would carry out the will of the citizens or lose power. A few leaders began to have second thoughts as pressures increased and Georgia perpetrated ever more outrageous crimes against the Cherokee people. This change in heart gained momentum from a younger generation of Cherokees. Educated in Connecticut, married to white women, and engaged in the pursuit of individual wealth, John Ridge and his cousin Elias Boudinot represented the rising generation of acculturated men whose skills and ambitions suited them to lead their people.
The motivations of this group were both national and personal. As Georgia continued extralegal maneuvers unchecked by Jackson's government, any hope for an equitable settlement dwindled. The Cherokees appealed to the highest legal authority, the United States Supreme Court, and discovered that favorable rulings provided no practical protection. Under these trying circumstances, removal could be viewed as a positive step for the Cherokee people. In addition, removal would personally benefit members of the negotiating party. They would gain both political and economic power because the United States government rewarded those who sided with its interests.
Striking out for their share of power, the Ridge faction decided to treat with the United States government for the sale of the Cherokee homeland. Two separate delegations arrived in Washington in 1834: John Ridge's to negotiate and John Ross's to fight. United States officials gladly dealt with Ridge and negotiated a treaty, even though Chief John Ross was the duly elected Principal Chief of the Cherokees. The Treaty of New Echota was signed by Major Ridge and Boudinot at a council meeting attended by about two percent of the Cherokee people. A petition from 16,000 Cherokee citizens failed to sway the United States Senate against the fraudulent treaty, and ratification passed Congress by a single vote. In a tragic but not unusual example of United States Indian affairs, a fraction of the population had committed the majority to move. The Ridge faction headed west soon after removal became official, but the bulk of the nation did nothing as the two-year deadline approached. When the time arrived, the federal government sent in the military to force removal of the Cherokees to Indian Territory. The resulting tragedy was the infamous Trail of Tears.
Although all Five Southeastern Nations endured removal, it was the Cherokees' removal journey, which they called "the trail where we cried," that captured American sympathy. Portrayed in novels and paintings, it was one of the most widely known events in American Indian history. Historian William T. Hagan referred to horrors of Nazi behavior in discussing the Indian removals of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Cherokees suffered tremendously during removal, experiencing at least a twenty-five percent loss in population and possibly an even higher rate. The loss of loved ones and family structure was only one part of the suffering. The unwilling migrants left behind personal property only to arrive in a strange land with few possessions. The divisions and factions created by removal, however, were more important to the Cherokees' future than the hardships of the move. Material losses were made up in one decade, but the hatred lasted for several.
Those who survived the trek arrived at Fort Gibson in northeastern Indian Territory and began reconstructing their lives in the Cherokee Nation's new homeland. Homes, churches, and businesses could be rebuilt, but unity could not. Relocation did not heal the wounds created by the dissent over removal. Tempers ran high, exacerbated by the horrors of the migration. On June 22, 1839, three treaty signers—Elias Boudinot, John Ridge, and his father, Major Ridge—were assassinated by Cherokees as punishment for violating the law forbidding the sale of tribal lands. Boudinot's brother, Stand Watie, quickly became the leader of the pro-treaty opposition to the Ross anti-removal faction. Thus, in the mid-1840s, the Cherokee Nation resembled an armed camp as retaliatory violence escalated. Officials recorded thirty-four murders within one year. With an official peace agreement reached in 1846, the issue of retribution died down, but the memories remained and would resurface in periods of stress. Other problems occupied the Cherokees—some directly from the new location, others from the existing divisions within the tribe. A political power struggle arose between the Ross majority and the "Old Settlers" who had migrated west in the 1820s. The conflict and divisions over removal remained fresh and prevented harmonious settlement. From a low point in 1839, rife with murders and vengeful violence, the Cherokees slowly rebuilt their nation. The divisions endured, however, and would reemerge in the 1860s.
After a difficult period of adjustment, the Cherokees seemed to be settling into their new homes. Areas such as Tahlequah developed into permanent settlements. Government, religious, and civic institutions served the people. Peace and prosperity did not last, however. Forces at work both within and beyond the tribes portended another period of chaos and loss for the Cherokees. The issues that split the tribe in the 1830s remained. Personal jealousies and near blood feuds divided powerful leaders. Some remnant of traditional kinship networks created an atmosphere in which relatives did not forgive, much less forget past wrongs. The Ridge-Watie and Ross families who had spilled blood in the recent past would have the opportunity to do so again under the banner of a military conflict.
Distrust of the federal government also remained an issue. Few could forget the hardship brought on by the U.S. removal policy. The same government planned for still more removals. Why should any Cherokee trust or aid that institution again? The Cherokee Nation did maintain a formal relationship with the federal government, but it was rarely concluded to the satisfaction of the Indians who continued to press for full compliance with treaty rights. The Cherokees who survived the upheavals of the 1830s and 1840s were headed directly into another life altering crisis in the 1860s.
SLAVERY
The nations of Indian Territory were fully aware of the sectional tensions that divided the North and South. Conflict that wracked Kansas in the late antebellum period spilled over into the neighboring Cherokee Nation. The election of 1860 reportedly caused "excitement and bitterness of feeling" throughout the region. The contentious issue of slavery, cause of the major controversy in the territories, also plagued Native peoples. Their long-term exposure to the political, economic, and social systems of white America ensured that the southeastern Indians would not be free of the impending sectional crisis.
Southeastern Indians held African Americans in chattel slavery, which differed from earlier forms of captivity among indigenous cultures such as the holding of war prisoners. The degree of involvement varied both between and within nations, but the practice remained viable. Generations of contact with the southern plantation economy provided a model for this practice. The development of the slave system among Native people was intriguing and complex. The ownership of humans contradicts a popular view of Native Americans as existing in egalitarian, subsistence level societies; however, slavery constituted part of a general acceptance of the dominant white society's economic, social, and political institutions. The process of assimilation encompassed both negative and positive aspects of the ascendant culture.
The Cherokee adoption of black slavery evolved as a direct result of an increased demand for labor accompanying the American government's encouragement of large scale agriculture among the Indians. When Native peoples adopted the white culture's relationship to blacks, they also took on white racial prejudice. African Americans who moved into Indian Country prior to the adoption of slavery often found a warm reception from people who had no concept of race. As racial slavery became established in the Southeastern Nations, however, so too did the idea of separation of races based on skin tones. While full-scale chattel slavery, which granted complete control to masters, developed gradually within Cherokee society, restrictive slave regulations appeared by the 1820s. Even so, the Cherokee slave codes prior to removal remained much less comprehensive than those in surrounding states.
Slavery caused economic, political and social divisions within the Cherokee nation. The adoption of a slave system allowed for more rapid development of classes within the tribe. Contemporary Ethan Allen Hitchcock noted the existence of distinct economic divisions in society soon after the Cherokee relocation to Indian Territory. Similar to the rest of the American South, Native slaveholding had the potential to concentrate great wealth in the hands of individuals. Owning African slaves became a form of capital accumulation which ran counter to more traditional concepts of tribalism. Political disputes over the role of slavery in Indian society usually emerged as part of a larger debate over the speed of assimilation. Native populations had long participated in extensive trade networks involving commodities, but growing cash crops marked a change for southeastern tribes. Because slavery so clearly connected Indians to Euro-American patterns of production for a market economy, it could be viewed as a strong feature of acculturation that contributed to a loss of Native traditions. The connection between slavery and social position further divided Indian communities. Indian slaveholders tended to be both elite and of mixed heritage. A list of the largest slaveholders in the Cherokee Nation reveals the influence of important mixed-blood families such as Adair, Vann, Ross, and Murrell. Slave owning represented a symbol of progress toward acculturation that furthered the divide in Cherokee society.
By the 1850s, slavery in the Indian nations evolved into a system less harsh than that of most southern plantations but no longer approximating earlier relationships between blacks and Indians. The Cherokees passed restrictive legislation that denied non-Cherokee blacks the right to own property, read and write, or even remain in the Cherokee Nation once freed. That the Cherokee slaves were not forbidden to carry weapons until 1841 testified to the less restrictive nature of the earlier system. By the Civil War period, however, Indian-owned slaves lost many of their former liberties. Some historians insist that at this point slavery among Indians was little different from that in the white South. But eyewitnesses had another impression. Union soldier Wiley Britton declared that slavery never existed in the Cherokee Nation in the same way as the rest of the South. He based his understanding on observations of black people who lived among the Cherokees. He noted that they never offered the deference and respect to Indians that characterized their behavior around white men. It was true, however, that Britton and his colleagues were members of the Union military force and may have represented both authority and an opportunity for freedom.
The Indian nations soon became involved in the national debate over the future of the slave system. It is doubtful that the Indians would have joined this controversy without outside influence, as they had accepted slavery for over a century with little dissension. External pressures arrived, however, in the form of missionaries and government agents. Thus the national debate that divided churches and political parties into northern and southern factions received a thorough airing in the Indian nations.
RELIGIOUS DIVISIONS
Missionaries had long been a part of Indian life, especially since the fervor of the Second Great Awakening inspired evangelicalism. They established a presence in the several nations prior to removal, operating churches and schools in an effort to bring Christianity to these particular nonbelievers. Operations did not cease during the upheaval of the 1830s. Many missionaries simply transferred their good intentions and resumed work in Indian Territory. The most dedicated practitioners aided the tribes in their fight to remain in their homeland. The Reverend Samuel Worcester offered an example of his devotion. In 1831 Georgia tried to divide the Cherokees from their white supporters by making it illegal for whites to enter Cherokee land without a state license. Viewing this as an abrogation of Cherokee sovereignty, several missionaries defied the new law and were arrested. Worcester (together with Elizur Butler) endured prison for over a year before he returned to the Cherokees. His challenge to state laws formed the basis of the Supreme Court case Worcester v. Georgia, which found Georgia's actions to be unconstitutional. Worcester continued to preach, translate, and print the gospel for the Cherokee people until he died in Tahlequah in 1859.
Missionaries in Indian Territory worked under the supervision of missionary societies, usually based in the North. These bodies, such as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), passed judgment on doctrinal and spiritual matters. The missionaries had to manage all daily responsibilities of their churches, schools, and mission properties. Some administrators, however, kept a close watch on local issues such as mission labor and church membership. Indeed, at times the oversight committees seemed more interested in secular matters than those of the spiritual realm. They also injected into Indian Territory the growing political and moral dispute over slavery. The problem of excluding slaveholders from Christian services entangled the northern missionary boards in a difficult situation with regard to Indian converts.
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Excerpted from The Cherokee Nation in the Civil War by Clarissa W. Confer. Copyright © 2007 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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