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The Slaveholding Indians

  (1) As Slaveholder and Secessionist
  (2) As Participants in the Civil War
  (3) Under Reconstruction

Vol. I




[Illustration: INDIAN TERRITORY, 1861 [_From General Land Office_]]




  The American Indian as
  Slaveholder and Secessionist

  AN OMITTED CHAPTER IN
  THE DIPLOMATIC HISTORY OF THE
  SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY


  BY ANNIE HELOISE ABEL, PH.D.


  THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY
  CLEVELAND: 1915




  COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
  ANNIE HELOISE ABEL




TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER




CONTENTS


      PREFACE                                                         13

    I GENERAL SITUATION IN THE INDIAN COUNTRY, 1830-1860              17

   II INDIAN TERRITORY IN ITS RELATIONS WITH TEXAS AND ARKANSAS       63

  III THE CONFEDERACY IN NEGOTIATION WITH THE INDIAN TRIBES          127

   IV THE INDIAN NATIONS IN ALLIANCE WITH THE CONFEDERACY            207

      APPENDIX A--FORT SMITH PAPERS                                  285

      APPENDIX B--THE LEEPER OR WICHITA AGENCY PAPERS                329

      SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY                                          359

      INDEX                                                          369




ILLUSTRATIONS


  INDIAN TERRITORY, 1861                                  _Frontispiece_

  MAP SHOWING FREE <DW64> SETTLEMENTS IN THE CREEK COUNTRY             25

  PORTRAIT OF COLONEL DOWNING, CHEROKEE                               65

  PORTRAIT OF JOHN ROSS, PRINCIPAL CHIEF OF THE CHEROKEES            112

  PORTRAIT OF COLONEL ADAIR, CHEROKEE                                221

  MAP SHOWING THE RETREAT OF THE LOYAL INDIANS                       263

  FORT MCCULLOCH                                                     281




PREFACE


This volume is the first of a series of three dealing with the
slaveholding Indians as secessionists, as participants in the Civil War,
and as victims under reconstruction. The series deals with a phase of
American Civil War history which has heretofore been almost entirely
neglected or, where dealt with, either misunderstood or misinterpreted.
Perhaps the third and last volume will to many people be the most
interesting because it will show, in great detail, the enormous price that
the unfortunate Indian had to pay for having allowed himself to become a
secessionist and a soldier. Yet the suggestiveness of this first volume is
considerably larger than would appear at first glance. It has been
purposely given a sub-title, in order that the peculiar position of the
Indian, in 1861, may be brought out in strong relief. He was enough inside
the American Union to have something to say about secession and enough
outside of it to be approached diplomatically. It is well to note, indeed,
that Albert Pike negotiated the several Indian treaties that bound the
Indian nations in an alliance with the seceded states, under the authority
of the Confederate State Department, which was a decided advance upon
United States practice--an innovation, in fact, that marked the tremendous
importance that the Confederate government attached to the Indian
friendship. It was something that stood out in marked contrast to the
indifference manifested at the moment by the authorities at Washington;
for, while they were neglecting the Indian even to an extent that
amounted to actual dishonor, the Confederacy was offering him political
integrity and political equality and was establishing over his country,
not simply an empty wardship, but a bona fide protectorate.

Granting then that the negotiations of 1861 with the Indian nations
constitute a phase of southern diplomatic history, it may be well to
consider to what Indian participation in the Civil War amounted. It was a
circumstance that was interesting rather than significant; and the
majority will have to admit that it was a circumstance that could not
possibly have materially affected the ultimate situation. It was the
Indian country, rather than the Indian owner, that the Confederacy wanted
to be sure of possessing; for Indian Territory occupied a position of
strategic importance, from both the economic and the military point of
view. The possession of it was absolutely necessary for the political and
the institutional consolidation of the South. Texas might well think of
going her own way and of forming an independent republic once again, when
between her and Arkansas lay the immense reservations of the great tribes.
They were slaveholding tribes, too, yet were supposed by the United States
government to have no interest whatsoever in a sectional conflict that
involved the very existence of the "peculiar institution." Thus the
federal government left them to themselves at the critical moment and left
them, moreover, at the mercy of the South, and then was indignant that
they betrayed a sectional affiliation.

The author deems it of no slight advantage, in undertaking a work of this
sort, that she is of British birth and antecedents and that her
educational training, so largely American as it is, has been gained
without respect to a particular locality. She belongs to no section of
the Union, has lived, for longer or shorter periods in all sections, and
has developed no local bias. It is her sincere wish that no charge of
prejudice can, in ever so small a degree, be substantiated by the
evidence, presented here or elsewhere.

  ANNIE HELOISE ABEL.
    Baltimore, September, 1914




I. THE GENERAL SITUATION IN THE INDIAN COUNTRY, 1830-1860


Veterans of the Confederate service who saw action along the
Missouri-Arkansas frontier have frequently complained, in recent years,
that military operations in and around Virginia during the War between the
States receive historically so much attention that, as a consequence, the
steady, stubborn fighting west of the Mississippi River is either totally
ignored or, at best, cast into dim obscurity. There is much of truth in
the criticism but it applies in fullest measure only when the Indians are
taken into account; for no accredited history of the American Civil War
that has yet appeared has adequately recognized certain rather interesting
facts connected with that period of frontier development; viz., that
Indians fought on both sides in the great sectional struggle, that they
were moved to fight, not by instincts of savagery, but by identically the
same motives and impulses as the white men, and that, in the final
outcome, they suffered even more terribly than did the whites. Moreover,
the Indians fought as solicited allies, some as nations, diplomatically
approached. Treaties were made with them as with foreign powers and not in
the farcical, fraudulent way that had been customary in times past. They
promised alliance and were given in return political position--a fair
exchange. The southern white man, embarrassed, conceded much, far more
than he really believed in, more than he ever could or would have
conceded, had he not himself been so fearfully hard pressed. His own
predicament, the exigencies of the moment, made him give to the Indian a
justice, the like of which neither one of them had dared even to dream. It
was quite otherwise with the northern white man, however; for he,
self-confident and self-reliant, negotiated with the Indian in the
traditional way, took base advantage of the straits in which he found him,
asked him to help him fight his battles, and, in the selfsame moment,
plotted to dispossess him of his lands, the very lands that had, less than
five and twenty years before, been pledged as an Indian possession "as
long as the grass should grow and the waters run."

From what has just been said, it can be easily inferred that two distinct
groups of Indians will have to be dealt with, a northern and a southern;
but, for the present, it will be best to take them all together.
Collectively, they occupied a vast extent of country in the so-called
great American desert. Their situation was peculiar. Their participation
in the war, in some capacity, was absolutely inevitable; but, preparatory
to any right understanding of the reasons, geographical, institutional,
political, financial, and military, that made it so, a rapid survey of
conditions ante-dating the war must be considered.

It will be remembered that for some time prior to 1860 the policy[1] of
the United States government had been to relieve the eastern states of
their Indian inhabitants and that this it had done, since the first years
of Andrew Jackson's presidency, by a more or less compulsory removal to
the country lying immediately west of Arkansas and Missouri. As a result,
the situation there created was as follows: In the territory comprehended
in the present state of Kansas, alongside of indigenous tribes, like the
Kansa and the Osage,[2] had been placed various tribes or portions of
tribes from the old Northwest[3]--the Shawnees and Munsees from Ohio,[4]
the Delawares, Kickapoos, Potawatomies, and Miamies from Indiana, the
Ottawas and Chippewas from Michigan, the Wyandots from Ohio and Michigan,
the Weas, Peorias, Kaskaskias, and Piankashaws from Illinois, and a few
New York Indians from Wisconsin. To the southward of all of those northern
tribal immigrants and chiefly beyond the later Kansas boundary, or in the
present state of Oklahoma, had been similarly placed the great[5] tribes
from the South[6]--the Creeks from Georgia and Alabama, the Cherokees
from Tennessee and Georgia, the Seminoles from Florida, and the Choctaws
and Chickasaws from Alabama and Mississippi.[7] The population of the
whole country thus colonized and, in a sense, reduced to the reservation
system, amounted approximately to seventy-four thousand souls, less than
seven thousand of whom were north of the Missouri-Compromise line. The
others were all south of it and, therefore, within a possible slave belt.

This circumstance is not without significance; for it is the colonized, or
reservation, Indians[8] exclusively that are to figure in these pages and,
since this story is a chapter in the struggle between the North and the
South, the proportion of southerners to northerners among the Indian
immigrants must, in the very nature of things, have weight. The relative
location of northern and southern tribes seems to have been determined
with a very careful regard to the restrictions of the Missouri Compromise
and the interdicted line of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes was
pretty nearly the boundary between them.[9] That it was so by accident may
or may not be subject for conjecture. Fortunately for the disinterested
motives of politicians but most unfortunately for the defenceless Indians,
the Cherokee land obtruded itself just a little above the thirty-seventh
parallel and formed a "Cherokee Strip" eagerly coveted by Kansans in later
days. One objection, be it remembered, that had been offered to the
original plan of removal was that, unless the slaveholding southern
Indians were moved directly westward along parallel lines of latitude,
northern rights under the Missouri Compromise would be encroached upon.
Yet slavery was not conscientiously excluded from Kansas in the days
antecedent to its organization as a territory. Within the Indian country,
and it was all Indian country then, slavery was allowed, at least on
sufferance, both north and south of the interdicted line. It was even
encouraged by many white men who made their homes or their living there,
by interlopers, licensed traders, and missionaries;[10] but it flourished
as a legitimate institution only among the great tribes planted south of
the line. With them it had been a familiar institution long before the
time of their exile. In their native haunts they had had <DW64> slaves as
had had the whites and removal had made no difference to them in that
particular. Since the beginning of the century refuge to fugitives and
confusion of ownership had been occasions for frequent quarrel between
them and the citizens of the