The purging of blacks from the rolls of the Cherokee nation, is another painful moment in the history of Afro-Indian history. I will also shed light on this subject.
This excellent synoposis, well researched, and important, was written by Bernard Vincent. the full text can be found here.
In the South-Eastern part of what has become the United States, there were also slaves among Indian tribes. Not much has been written on those slaveholding Indians nor on the life of their slaves: the subject has received very little attention It was not until the late 1970s that at least two reliable treatments of the subject appeared in print in the U.S. Rudi Halliburton, Jr’.s Red over Black: Black Slavery among the Cherokee Indians9 was published in 1977, soon followed in 1979 by Theda Perdue’s Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-186610. I shall here focus on the Cherokee tribe, partly because it is a better documented case, but also because, toward the end of the eighteenth century, the Cherokees became the chosen keystone of the U.S. Government’s “civilization program”... whose ironic and tragic outcome was the Trail of Tears.
Things changed when the first white traders arrived (around 1674). The Cherokees became increasingly dependent on European manufactured products (knives, hatchets, hoes, guns) and they in turn were suddenly threatened with being enslaved by the whites. It was in fact after the ‘Jamestown massacre’ of 1622 that “the Indians who had previously been treated as friends [by white settlers] could now be enslaved and forced to work . . . or exported to Bermuda.”11 The enslavement of Indians was actively encouraged by the white colonial authorities, and traffic in Indian slaves developed on a large scale. The Cherokees themselves often participated in “slave raids, [thus] obtaining slaves to exchange for English goods” (Perdue, 26). In 1708, the population of South Carolina “totaled 9,850 [people], including 2,900 African slaves and 1,400 Indian slaves”: in other words, slaves of both colors represented 44% of the population, and one slave out of three was an Indian!
An important cultural shift also took place. War captives became the personal property of the captors, so that Cherokees owned slaves “individually and not communally” (Perdue, 34). The desire to accumulate wealth which had no place in their traditional way of life began to play an important, if not a central role in their culture, thus preparing the ground for the future adoption of Western economic habits. It was probably because of these mimetic capacities that the Indians of that region were called the “five civilized tribes.”
But the first encounter between Indians and blacks probably dates back to 1526, when Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón, escorted by 500 colonists and about 100 African slaves, undertook to establish a settlement near the mouth of the Pedee River in South Carolina. Ayllón soon died of fever. After his death, disputes broke out among the settlers and some of the slaves escaped in the forest and found refuge with the local Indians, who had never seen black-skinned individuals before. “Black slaves later accompanied Spanish expeditions to the Cherokees, including those of Hernando de Soto in 1540 and Juan Pardo in 1567” (Perdue, 36). After these first encounters, the employment, by white settlers, of enslaved Indians alongside African slaves “produced extensive contacts between the two peoples,” but increasingly Cherokees became acquainted with blacks in another manner—as “warriors capturing black bondsmen” (Perdue, 36, 37). A treaty signed between the British and the Cherokees in 1730 encouraged the capture of African fugitives: “For every slave so apprehended and brought back, the Indian that brings him shall receive a gun and a matchcoat [woolen mantle].”12
In 1835, the Cherokees of Georgia owned a total of 776 black slaves: there were 23 full-blood slaveowners possessing a total of 69 slaves; 14 female slaveowners possessing a total of 70 slaves; and 73 mixed-blood Cherokees who possessed 637 slaves (i.e. 82% of the total number).14
By the end of the eighteenth century, the Cherokees, increasingly anxious to acquire manufactured goods through the sale of deerskins, “had seriously depleted their supply of game.” Coupled with various and large cessions of land,15 excessive hunting resulted in a growing economic crisis which had a profound effect on Cherokee culture, working habits and division of labor: only when the identification of women with agriculture had ended [did] the [large-scale] introduction and utilization of slave labor for cultivation by even a minority of Cherokees [become] possible” (Perdue, 53).
This evolution was suddenly facilitated and accelerated when in the last decade of the eighteenth century George Washington and his Secretary of Defense Henry Knox decided to launch an ambitious program aiming at civilizing the ‘savages’: the idea was to transform the Indians, and first of all the Cherokees, into farmers motivated by the concept of individual property and profit.
This project, later on taken over and amplified by Thomas Jefferson, was on the whole enthusiastically received by the Cherokees. Accepting the challenge and playing the game—even better than was expected—they became farmers,16 artisans, laborers; they opened schools and built churches; some became Christians, others freemasons,17 some were both; over time they had their own lawyers and doctors; they created a library, a museum, a learned society, and launched their own newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix, which still exists today.
A few Cherokees, predominantly but not exclusively ‘half-breeds’, as they used to be called, were extremely successful and wealthy, owning large plantations, dressing like Europeans, living in substantial mansions, served and assisted by numerous slaves. An 1824 census indicates that there were at the time 16,000 Cherokees in the South-Eastern states (30% more than in 1809), not including 1,277 black slaves (an increase of almost 120%!).18 In 1822, they instituted a Supreme Court and in 1827 drafted and adopted a Constitution of their own, modeled on the U.S. Federal Constitution and based on the separation of powers.
The government of the Cherokee Nation was to a large extent in the hands of Cherokee slaveholders: “Of the twelve signers of the [Cherokee] Constitution of 1827 . . . eleven owned bondsmen . . . [they owned in fact] 22% of all the slaves in the Cherokee Nation” (Perdue, 57).
there were also a number of laws passed by the National Council which all tended to control and restrict the activities of black bondsmen: runaway slaves from white plantations were regarded and treated as “intruders,” and free blacks from outside could not reside in the Cherokee Nation without a special permit; intermarriages between Negro slaves and Indians, or whites, were unlawful (male offenders were punished with fifty-nine stripes on the bare back—female offenders with only twenty-five); purchasing goods from slaves was prohibited; slaves could neither own property, nor buy or sell liquor, nor take their masters to court for maltreatment or other forms of abuse. And those things happened.
One essential difference between white and Indian slaveholders was that, according to Halliburton, “the Cherokees did not experience the practice of slavery and [bad] conscience [emphasis mine] that permeated much of the United States. They never felt the need to justify slavery and never expressed the opinion that slavery was in the best interest of the black . Slavery was justified only on the basis of benefits that accrued to the masters” (Red, 38).
In proportion as the original civilization program became real, a growing number of whites began to realize the dangers contained in the planned evolution of Cherokees. If indeed the Indians became ‘civilized’, if the hunter became a farmer and cultivated his fields with the help of slaves, and if in addition he was a normal educated church-going citizen, on what ground could the remaining Indian lands be confiscated from such ‘Americans’?
Four events marked the pivotal year 1828: the election of John Ross, a rich full- blood Cherokee slaveowner, as ‘Principal Chief’ of the Cherokee Nation; the election of Andrew Jackson to the White House; and the decision of Georgia to invalidate all the legislation recently adopted by the Cherokee National Council, including its Constitution, and to place all Cherokees and Cherokee possessions under its sole political jurisdiction. The final, crowning event was the discovery of large quantities of gold in Cherokee territory.
The fate of the Cherokee Nation was then sealed: however ‘civilized’ and ‘American’ they had become, they would, willingly or unwillingly, be removed en masse to some western land, on the other side of the Mississippi River. In 1830 Congress passed the historic ‘Removal Act’, which gave President Jackson the authority to organize the exclusion and relocation of the Cherokees and other southern Indians in the West. In accordance with the 1802 agreement signed by Jefferson, the lands and other properties of the Cherokees were to be redistributed to the Georgians, and this was done through a lottery system. The ruling of the Supreme Court—in Worcester v. Georgia (1832)—was, as is well known, of no avail.
Ross and his group stuck to their guns and rejected all forms of compromise. The modernists, on the other hand, considered the removal of their tribe as inevitable, doubted that resistance would succeed, and preferred to obtain through negotiation the best possible material and moral terms for their departure and transfer. In December 1835, in the presence of some 500 Cherokees (out of 16,000), John Ridge and his allies signed, at New Echota, the capital of the Nation, a treaty by which they relinquished all claims to Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi River in exchange for five million dollars to cover spoliations, and a large tract of land (seven million acres) located in the north-eastern part of Indian Territory (today’s Oklahoma). From that moment on, the signers and their followers were referred to as the ‘Treaty Party’—an expression construed by the other group as meaning the ‘Traitors’ Party.
The leaders of both parties were rich planters. They owned or hired slaves and none had a bad conscience about it, nor were they in favor of emancipation. John Ross, for one, leader of the National Party, possessed a plantation and a ferry, had 19 slaves working on 170 acres of fields and orchards. His daughter was destined to marry into the finest Philadelphia society, and finally did. His own brother, Lewis, had 41 slaves. His treasurer, John Martin, had 100 slaves. Among the Treaty Party leaders, Major Ridge had some 30 slaves and his son, John, 21 (Red, 22-27). Like everybody else, John Ross took his own slaves to Oklahoma and never thought of freeing them although he was both a Christian and a freemason. It must also be noted that this ‘traditionalist’ leader was so acculturated to white society that he could not speak Cherokee and had to use an interpreter when addressing—in English—his own National Council!
Lewis Ross, brother of the Principal Chief, did on the eve of the forced removal: suspecting that there would be a high demand for slaves in Oklahoma, he bought 500 black bondsmen and had them transported by boat for sale in the new territory! 20Once displaced and relocated in Oklahoma, the Ross family was even wealthier than before, and John Ross took to living with all his slaves in a magnificent mansion called ‘Rose Cottage’.
The period following the removal of the Cherokee Nation was one of violence and chaos. The ‘Old Settlers’ expected the newly-arrived Cherokees to “accept their previously established government, laws, and chiefs” (Perdue, 73). But Ross and his nationalist friends, who far outnumbered the Old Settlers, refused to comply, and strove to keep their former institutions and laws alive. Hoping to render Ross powerless, the Treaty Party sided with the Old Settlers, but in June 1839 its key leaders (Major Ridge, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot) were cold- bloodedly assassinated by members of the National Party—who used as justification a law of 1829 (originally proposed by Major Ridge himself!) which made the unauthorized cession of Cherokee land to whites a capital offence. Only Stand Watie was able to escape: twenty years later, he reappeared as brigadier general in the Confederate army, burned down John Ross’s beautiful mansion (‘Rose Cottage’) at Park Hill, and at the end of the Civil War was the last Confederate general to surrender (June 23, 1865).
On the eve of the Civil War, according to the 1860 census, there was a total of 2,504 black slaves in the Oklahoma Cherokee Nation (60% more than in 1835, on the eve of the Great Removal). Only 2% of the Cherokee population owned slaves (Red, 177 ).23 But this fact did not prevent the Cherokees as a whole—or almost as a whole—from siding with the white Southerners during the great national struggle over slavery and emancipation. To whatever faction they belonged, however rich or poor, most Cherokees were hostile to the idea of freeing slaves. They were so intolerant of abolitionist sentiments that the missionaries or school teachers who dared disseminate antislavery doctrines “often found themselves threatened with banishment from the Nation” (Red, 91).
Stand Watie, who had become a wealthy planter and slaveowner, unhesitatingly rallied to the Confederates—like the vast majority of the Oklahoma Cherokees— and became the first Indian general in American history. With his help, and John Ross’s half-hearted approval, “two Cherokee regiments were raised for the Confederate service” (Red, 128).24 John Ross had first sided with the Union but, impressed by the first victories of the Confederate army (in particular at Bull Run and Wilson’s Creek), and anxious to preserve the unity of his Nation, he rather reluctantly decided to change sides and support the South. When the winds of war began to shift, Ross and some of his friends readjusted their position once more.
In February 1863, members of the Cherokee faction that had remained loyal to the Union met in council and repudiated the alliance with the South, which was now on its way to total defeat. Taking their inspiration from President Lincoln’s recent Emancipation Proclamation, the Federal Cherokees “passed an act which emancipated slaves and abolished slavery within their Nation” (Red, 131). The signers, although they were the first group to abolish slavery voluntarily during the Civil War, had in fact little to lose because they had no, or very few, slaves. The large slaveowners were practically all supporters of the South, and “they totally disregarded the [emancipation] law” adopted by the pro-Union group (Red, 133). And so did the Federal authorities! When the war ended, they indeed claimed that, since most Cherokees had aligned themselves with the Confederacy, “all existing treaties between the two nations were void” (Red, 133). A post-Civil War treaty was eventually signed in Washington on July 19, 1866. It provided that, in Oklahoma, the Cherokees—but also free Negroes and freed slaves—had the right
to settle in and occupy a territory “which include[d] a quantity of land equal to one hundred and sixty acres for each person who [might] so elect to reside in the [said] territory” (Red, 134). Regarding those who had found refuge outside the Cherokee Nation during the war, Article 9 stated that all free blacks and all freedmen, and their descendants, “who may return within six months . . . shall have all the rights of native Cherokees” (Red, 135). Alas, many of them were not informed in time, and returned home after the fateful date of January 19, 1867—to discover that “they were not citizens, but intruders” and were no longer entitled to a tract of tillable land (Red, 136). The outcome of war was in their favor, but once again fate and the injustice of history were against them, and many were then forced to live from hand to mouth. To make matters even worse, in 1910, a grandfather clause in the new Oklahoma constitution disenfranchised all blacks: those former slaves, or their descendants, “became so discouraged with their lot that they [engaged] in a forlorn effort to return to Africa.”25
When studying the condition of the black slaves of Cherokee masters, one cannot but observe that their work activities and living conditions were quite similar to those of their counterparts in the Southern states. One essential difference was that the Cherokees, whether or not they owned slaves, never questioned the legitimacy of slavery, never experienced any qualms of conscience about it, never felt the necessity to justify (or condemn) it morally, never developed any kind of ‘underground railroad’ within their Nation, never established any abolitionist movement. Even today “there appears to be little or no feeling of guilt” among them (Red,144).
One, moreover, can understand that a people under siege as the Cherokees were, dispossessed of their ancestral lands by the greed of a rival and conquering culture, their traditions undermined and debased, and forced en masse onto the tragic Trail of Tears, would be too focused on their own catastrophe to make the additional effort of having a Christlike attitude toward another group of downtrodden people. Nor should one forget the central paradox which characterized their evolution: the more ‘civilized’ they became, or were asked to become, the more proslavery and, if I may say so, the more ‘white’ they tended to be, in both sensibility and practice.
One of my aims here was to show that the so-called ‘benevolence’ of slaveholding Indians, and of Cherokee slavery in particular, is a myth: a myth which, incidentally, was above all “created by the missionaries, Indian superintendents, and Cherokee agents,” all of them taking care not to displease the influential Cherokee slaveowners when writing their official reports (Red, 144). And a myth that enables the historian to avoid adding in any way to the Indian’s historical burden. In part, it is probably because of that mythical benevolence that the case of slaveholding Indians has been so much neglected and has given rise to so little research: why indeed bother about something that is not perceived as problematic or questionable? Not a single line, for instance, in John Hope Franklin’s famous history of Negro Americans, From Slavery to Freedom.
Selected Bibliography
Abel, Annie Heloise. The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London 1992 [1915]. Excellent on Indians as secessionists, but barely mentions the existence of slavery among Native Americans!
“C”. “Slavery Among the Indians.” Southern Literary Messenger XXVIII (May 1859): pp.333-34. Anonymous but interesting point of view of a proslavery Southerner.
Halliburton, R., Jr. Red over Black: Black Slavery among the Cherokee Indians, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT 1977.
McLoughlin, William G. “Red Indians, Black Slavery and White Racism: America’s Slaveholding Indians.” American Quarterly 26, no. 4 (October
1974): pp.367-85. Emphasizes the ‘racist’ dimension of Indian attitudes in the practice of black slavery.
Perdue, Theda. Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866, The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville 1979.
Roethler, Michael. “Negro Slavery among the Cherokee Indians, 1540-1866.” Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1964.
Sturm, Circe. Blood Politics: Race, Culture and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 2002. An in-depth analysis of the ‘blood, color and race’ issue as historically experienced by the Cherokees.
Willis, William S. “Divide and Rule: Red, White and Black in the Southeast.” Journal of Negro History 48 (July 1963): pp.157-76.
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