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The Cherokee had a long history of involvement with white Americans prior to the Civil War. Not only had they fought against them, but they had fought with them. Cherokee participation in the Creek War (1813-14) and the aid given to Andrew Jackson in 1812 in the war against the British were critical for US victory. Furthermore the Cherokee were foremost among Native American tribes who adopted white culture and practices, designated one of the “Five Civilized Tribes”. They developed a written form of their language, adopted a constitution for their nation based on the American one, set up a judiciary and a police force, established dozens of schools, and produced the first Native American newspaper. Towards the end of the 18th century they began to cultivate lands in individual farmsteads rather than communally, modelling their society largely on the white South, even to the extent of owning black slaves.
The adoption of the Cherokee constitution in 1827 was tantamount to a declaration of independence, of the existence of a state within a state. This went down badly with the white government of Georgia where most of their land was located. At about the same time gold was discovered on the Indian lands. A process of removal of Native American peoples to the west of the Mississippi had been under way since the early years of the century, and now the Cherokee were put under pressure to give up their traditional lands. The Georgia state legislature passed a law in 1830 claiming full jurisdiction over all Cherokees within its boundaries, and although the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the Cherokees’ rights as a “distinct political community”, Andrew Jackson, now US president, backed the Georgia legislature which encouraged marauding white prospectors to ignore the ruling and flood into Cherokee territory.
Jackson then approved the 1830 Indian Removal Act which appeared reasonable on paper and required voluntary acceptance by the tribes being moved. It was, however, merely a legal gloss on the coercive practices which followed. Jackson claimed that the relocation of the Cherokee was an act of benevolence because they had failed to assimilate into white culture and were living in unproductive squalor – both false assertions. Under extreme pressure, a section of the Cherokee leadership headed by John and Major Ridge signed a treaty agreeing to relocation. Most of the tribe did not want to move, and when the deadline for voluntary removal passed in 1838, the US Army evicted them forcibly. They were herded into stockades where hundreds died of dysentery and malnutrition, before being forced to march 800 miles to modern-day eastern Oklahoma in deepest winter where many more perished. In all, about 4,000 of the 13,000 evictees died on the “Trail of Tears”.
By the 1860s, the acrimony and internecine killings which had split the Cherokees over acceptance of removal, had largely healed. John Ross, who had opposed relocation, was now a major chief, as was Stand Watie, one of the few leaders of the Ridge Party who had survived a murderous purge by Ross’s supporters in 1839. When the Civil War erupted in 1861, Ross wanted the nation to remain neutral, but Watie and many other chiefs favoured supporting the South. Watie’s nephew, Elias Cornelius Boudinot, a successful lawyer before moving to Arkansas where he became congressman and representative in the secessionist convention, helped raise the first Cherokee regiment and went on to become the Cherokee representative to the Confederate Congress in Richmond.
This alliance was assisted by the Confederate government’s eagerness to get the Indian Territory, sitting directly on their north-western flank, on their side. They immediately entered into negotiations upon the outbreak of war, promising to take on the obligations and debts owed by the US government to all the tribes. Even more appealing was the promise to allow them to control their own lands and to have representation in the Confederate Congress. Equal pay with white soldiers was also guaranteed to Native Americans who enlisted in the Confederate army.
From the Cherokees’ perspective, the secession which the Confederate states were insisting upon and which the Federal government was resisting, appeared similar to the separation which they had attempted in 1827. Although it was the Southern state of Georgia which had opposed this, it was Jackson and his successor, van Buren, who ordered the Federal government to carry out the forced removals, while the first commander-in-chief of the Union armies in 1861 was Winfield Scott, who had commanded the Federal troops which brutally rounded up and herded the Cherokee westwards. A final and strong incentive for allying with the South was the declaration in 1860 by William Seward, campaigning for Abraham Lincoln, that a Republican government would open up the Indian Territory to white settlers.
Stand Watie, who eventually rose to the rank of brigadier general, raised a cavalry regiment which he commanded in the field. It fought largely in the Indian Territoriy and Arkansas against other Indian units who sided with the Union, and also used highly effective hit-and-run raiding tactics to attack railways, wagon trains and steamboats, causing the Federal armies to commit large numbers of troops to the protection of these supply lines, forces which otherwise could have been used on the front line. The first action which the Cherokee regiment saw was in August 1861 at Oak Hills, a successful engagement, followed by a further victory in December 1861 at the Battle of Chustenahlah. Watie commanded the pursuit of the defeated pro-Union Indians and pushed them back into Kansas. Although Watie’s men were exempt from service outside Indian Territory, he led them into Arkansas in the spring of 1862. This led to the best known military action of the Cherokee which took place during the two-day battle of Pea Ridge. On the first day they attacked and captured a Union artillery battery alongside the 9th Texas Cavalry. On day two the Confederates suffered a resounding defeat. In the rout which followed, many of the Indian regiments fled in disarray, but the Cherokees turned and fought, covering the retreat of the Confederate forces and preventing a total rout.
After the debacle of Pea Ridge, the Confederacy lost control of three quarters of Arkansas. Watie’s Cherokees were absorbed into a larger Native American Confederate brigade under his command which henceforth concentrated almost wholly upon swift raiding, fighting as far afield as Missouri, Kansas and Texas. Very little help came to them thereafter from white Confederate forces and raiding became a means of actually surviving. Their most successful engagement was the spectacular capture at Cabin Creek in the Indian Territories in September 1864 of a huge Union wagon train whose value was somewhere in the region of $1.5 million. In all, the Cherokee units in the west are reckoned to have taken part in eighteen battles or major skirmishes over the course of the war, while Watie was the last Confederate general to surrender in June 1865.
There was, however, a darker side to the actions of the Indian Brigade. Watie, like others among the Cherokee elite, was a slave-owner and regarded black people as inferior. Around the same time as the raid at Cabin Creek, his forces descended upon a party of black hay-cutters gathering fodder for Union horses and massacred them all, even slaughtering the wounded. Equally significantly, much of the fighting in the last three years of the war was Cherokee upon Cherokee, and most was carried out on their own lands destroying property, crops and livestock. Hundreds were killed in revenge and reprisal raids in a conflict that came increasingly to resemble the pre-war mayhem of Missouri and Kansas in the 1850s. Four thousand Cherokee were killed between 1861 and 1865, a casualty rate enormously higher proportionately than any state on either side suffered.
Some Cherokee had avoided deportation in 1838. A few hundred remained in Georgia for various reasons, and a few thousand more lived in North Carolina and East Tennessee. Most of the Eastern Band Cherokee who elected to fight in the Civil War similarly chose the Confederacy. They were largely enrolled in the 69th North Carolina Regiment, also known as Thomas’ Legion of Indians and Highlanders. It was raised and commanded by William Holland Thomas, the only white man ever to become a Cherokee chief.
400 Cherokees served in the Indian Battalion of the Legion. It spent much of the war in a defensive role guarding railroads and installations and fighting in skirmishes against Union raiders, but in 1864 it was transferred to Virginia where it took part in Jubal Early’s famous raid through the Shenandoah Valley which brought Confederate forces right up to the suburbs of Washington. One of the most important roles of the Legion was enforcing some measure of law and order in the Southern Appalachian area where, under cover of war, deserters and criminal gangs roamed the countryside pillaging and killing indiscriminately.
Not all the Cherokee fought for the Confederacy. A small minority of the Eastern Band joined the Union forces and suffered reprisals from their tribe when the war ended. A larger number, although still a minority, did so among the Western Band, following John Ross whose initial lukewarm acceptance of the alliance soon changed to outright hostility to the idea. When he was taken prisoner by Federal forces in 1862 he declared his support for the Union, was granted a pardon and assumed the leadership of a rival National Council in exile. This Council abolished slavery in the Nation in 1863 and renounced the Ordinance of Secession passed earlier. During the course of the war, some Cherokee changed sides from the Confederacy to the Union, including the defection of Drew’s Mounted Rifles, part of the
Cherokee unit which fought at Pea Ridge. Some historians have argued that there was a racial division which correlated with which side Western Band Cherokees chose to support. Full-blooded members, known as Pin Indians, who mostly did not own slaves, tended to be Union supporters, while mixed-blood Cherokees went with the Confederacy. It was certainly the case that Drew was a Ross ally and most of his unit was made up of full-bloods.
When the Civil War ended, the US government had the problem of what do with the Cherokee, since large numbers of them had fought on both sides. The old feuds and splits of the 1830s had reopened and created a civil war within a civil war. It was unclear to those investigating the role of the Cherokee whether they had remained officially loyal to the Union and a usurping faction had forced the Nation to fight with the South, or whether the majority had willingly rebelled. Hindsight shows that the majority supported the Confederacy, but in the immediate aftermath of the war this was not so apparent. At the heart of the debate was the issue of nationhood, a question which had always been central for the Cherokee in their dealings with the US government throughout the 19th century. Despite their bitter internecine differences, on this issue all factions of the Cherokee were agreed – it was on how to best achieve the preservation of the nation that they had fought and killed each other. Ross’s reluctant support for an alliance with the Confederacy had been based on the early Southern victories of 1861 which seemed to suggest the USA would split into two states. Similarly, his commitment to the Union before and after came from a belief that the Federal government was a necessary if unwelcome guarantor of Cherokee sovereignty, so in each instance the unity of the Nation guided his actions.
The US government finally decided to negotiate new treaties, and over the course of a year a bitter struggle between the two Cherokee factions saw them arguing as much with each other as with the US government representatives. So intense was the struggle that the pro-Confederate faction briefly tried to persuade the US commissioners to recommend splitting the Cherokee nation in two. However, the commissioners were representative of the victors and in the end they very much imposed what they saw fit, and chose to have the treaty signed by Ross rather than Watie, despite regarding him as duplicitous and opportunistic. The unity of the Cherokee Nation was preserved, something which was quickly accepted after Ross died suddenly in 1866. Slavery was abolished in the Territory, with former Cherokee black slaves given the right to adopt Cherokee citizenship, an issue which caused huge dissent within the tribe and was resisted throughout the whole Reconstruction period. The right of railway companies to drive two lines through the Territory was imposed, land allocation was reduced, some going to white settlers and some allotted to other tribes who were relocated to the area.
One of the most far-reaching treaty stipulations was the setting up of an inter-tribal council to supervise the whole of the Indian Territoriy, which slowly undermined the real autonomy of the individual tribes. This was almost certainly part of a deliberate strategy by the commissioners. If the Indian lands became more like the normal structure of American possessions, such change would hasten the erosion of the independent nations and Federal law would require that the Territoriy be opened to non-Indian settlement (McLoughlin 219). This was in line with a greater acceptance in the United States during and after the war that central government should involve itself more in society and the economy, and that it was a legitimate force for good and for progress. When allied with the prevalent racist and paternalistic attitudes of white society in both the North and South, this proved ominous for all the tribes. They were to be remade as Americans in a mould which white men would design. The head of the Commission, D.N. Cooley, declared that too much land was bad for Indians, so it had to be given to white people who were more responsible and would use it more productively, indicative of the arrogant view that Native Americans were childlike as well as savage. The eventual demise of the Indian Territory and its absorption into the state of Oklahoma in 1907 under white control demonstrated that US plans and Cherokee fears would eventually be realised.
The Cherokees suffered greatly before, during and after the Civil War. Their central desire was to remain an autonomous people – willing to adapt to white ways, but under their own control. However, the overwhelming might of the United States flowed around them and ultimately over them on repeated occasions. Realising that they could not fight such an irresistible force, they tried to harness Federal power to protect their limited sovereignty, but such centralised power was a double-edged sword which constantly pared down their autonomy as well as their land holdings. When the Civil War broke out, the choice of allying with the Confederacy was taken because it looked like a better option for survival. What they actually got was a devastating civil war of their own which threatened to do quickly what white America had been doing slowly – destroy their unity. Despite protestations of loyalty to the Union before and after the war, the Cherokee were never truly loyal to anyone but themselves. This may have offended white Americans, but it was more justified than the patronising attitude which expected Native Americans to be grateful to the “Great White Father” in Washington.
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Franks, Kenny A. “Stand Watie”. Web. Accessed 15/08/2012 at: http://www.civilwarhome.com/watiebio.htm
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Treaty with the Cherokee 1866. Web. Accessed through the Oklahoma State Library 16/08/2012 at: http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/VOL2/treaties/che0942.htm
