Cherokee in the American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  Cherokee in the American Civil War were not a single army marching under one flag. They were a divided people, pulled apart by blood, language, class, and a history of betrayal stretching back decades before the first shot was fired. Principal Chief John Ross stood before the crisis demanding neutrality. Stand Watie began recruiting for the Confederate army on the 1st of June, 1861. By October of that year, the Cherokee Nation had signed a formal treaty of alliance with the Confederacy. How did a nation of roughly 21,000 people end up fighting on both sides of the deadliest war in American history? The answer reaches back to the Blue Ridge Mountains, to the halls of the U.S. Supreme Court, and to a forced march that the Cherokee called the Trail of Tears. What drove the split between Ross and Watie? What happened in the mountain passes of western North Carolina? And how did the war's end bring an entirely new catastrophe down on the Cherokee people? Those questions are what this story is about.

• 2. Roots of Division

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  Before removal, the Cherokee Nation was centered in and around the Blue Ridge Mountains, spanning what is now southwestern North Carolina, southeastern Tennessee, western South Carolina, and northeastern Georgia. In 1830, a delegation led by Chief John Ross brought Cherokee rights before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case known as Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. The court set a precedent in Indian Country, but the federal government enforced removal anyway, driving most of the Cherokee west of the Mississippi River along what became known as the Trail of Tears. The Cherokee blamed former President Andrew Jackson and the federal government for that dispossession.

  Long before secession was ever a question, the Cherokee had adopted what the source describes as "Southern ways." Cherokee society held slavery as a primary institution throughout the pre-war period. Cherokee judicial and legislative bodies enacted laws that barred first "black (or negro) slaves" and then "persons of color" altogether from citizenship within the nation. The underlying logic was to legally position the Cherokee as equal to white or European Americans, a status purchased at the expense of Black and other non-Indian groups.

  When William Seward campaigned on behalf of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, he said that Lincoln would open the Indian Territory for white settlement. That statement alarmed the Cherokee in Indian Territory deeply. Their cultural, trading, and legal ties to the seceding Southern states were already strong. Their fear of losing their land to white settlers made Confederate alignment look, to many, like the more protective bet.

• 3. The Confederate Alliance

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  In early 1861, the Confederate States of America appointed Albert Pike as Commissioner for tribes west of Arkansas and south of Kansas, charging him with securing Indian Territory for the CSA. Pike was a deliberate negotiator. By mid-1861 he had begun facilitating treaties with one tribe after another. The Treaty with the Creek Nation came in July 1861. Eight more agreements followed in succession, with the Cherokee signing last, in October of that year.

  The fault lines within the Cherokee Nation shaped how this alliance was received. Full-blooded Cherokee, described in the source not as a racial but as a cultural and class distinction, tended to support Principal Chief John Ross. These were largely Cherokee-speaking, nationalist, and anti-slavery people. The mixed-blooded Cherokee, largely English-speaking, assimilationist, and slaveholding, gravitated toward Stand Watie. The Gold Cloak Society, composed mainly of mixed slave owners, supported the Confederacy. The Keetoowah Society organized to oppose that support.

  Ross insisted that the Union was not dissolved, but the pressure became impossible to resist. Union troops abandoned positions in Cherokee territory. Financial concerns pressed hard as well: abrogating federal treaties would cut off income streams and forfeit principal sums obtained in earlier negotiations. The ninth and final "treaty of friendship and alliance" was signed on the 7th of October, 1861, in Tahlequah. Stand Watie, who had been recruiting all-Indian Confederate units since June, was elected Chief of the newly declared Southern Cherokee Nation in 1862.

• 4. War in Indian Territory

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  Stand Watie led primarily Native Confederate forces in the Indian Territory, in what is now the state of Oklahoma. For the duration of the war, small battles and constant guerrilla warfare marked the Cherokee presence there. The engagements ranged from the Battle of Wilson's Creek on the 10th of August, 1861, through a long series of clashes including the Battle of Honey Springs on the 17th of July, 1863, and the Second Battle of Cabin Creek on the 19th of September, 1864.

  On the 15th of June, 1864, Cherokee forces under Watie ambushed the steamboat J. R. Williams, one of the more unusual actions of the western campaign. The Cherokee Nation had approximately 21,000 members during the war, with 3,000 serving in the Confederacy as soldiers. Their units included the First Cherokee Mounted Rifles, two regiments of Cherokee Mounted Volunteers, a Cherokee artillery battalion, partisan rangers, and several cavalry battalions.

  When the war ended, Watie became the last Confederate general to end fighting. He formally surrendered on the 25th of June, 1865, at Fort Towson, in the southeastern portion of the Indian Territory.

• 5. Thomas' Legion in the Mountains

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  William H. Thomas was a European-American man who had been adopted Cherokee. In May 1861, he began recruiting Cherokees from the Quallatown, North Carolina area. The first two companies were mostly Indian soldiers. The unit started the war known as the Junaluska Zouaves, then became Thomas' Legion of Cherokee Indians and Highlanders, and was later designated the 69th North Carolina Regiment, with a total of 1,125 men.

  Originally stationed outside Knoxville at Strawberry Plains, Tennessee, the Legion's primary duty was to protect the Alum Cave and harass Union forces moving through Tennessee. While operating near Chattanooga in June 1862, Thomas personally captured a Union soldier. After that, each of his men reportedly vowed to capture at least one Union soldier before the war ended.

  The defining and most controversial moment for the Legion came on the 15th of September, 1862. At Baptist Gap, a Cherokee leader named Astoogahtogeh was killed leading a charge while trying to stop a Union advance. The remaining Cherokee, enraged by his death, scalped the dead Union soldiers after the battle. When newspapers reported the event, Union soldiers came to fear the Cherokee in the mountains. Thomas, however, feared for his people's reputation. He did not want them seen as barbaric, so the scalps were sent to be buried with the soldiers they had originally belonged to.

  After a number of Thomas' men were captured in February 1864, some accepted the Union argument that they were fighting for slavery and switched sides. Others pretended to defect but returned to Thomas, reporting that Union officials had offered five thousand dollars for Thomas' scalp. Many of his men were subsequently sent to Virginia, and some were present at Appomattox Court House when General Robert E. Lee surrendered. The rest of the Legion kept fighting until surrendering on the 10th of May, 1865.

• 6. Reconstruction's Bitter Settlement

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  The eastern Cherokee faced a severe smallpox outbreak in the immediate aftermath of the war. Thomas and many of his followers were so deeply in debt that the federal government eventually recognized the eastern tribe as a separate legal entity from the western tribe and filed a lawsuit against the Cherokee's creditors, effectively placing the eastern Cherokee under federal protection.

  In the west, the political maneuvering was even more damaging. Indian Commissioner D. N. Cooley saw an opportunity in the Cherokee split between Ross and Watie. Union Cherokee factions established policies that confiscated land from Confederate Cherokee. The federal government promised Confederate Cherokee that those confiscation laws would be annulled. They were not. Cooley went so far as to portray Ross as a traitor, despite the fact that Ross had consistently been a Union advocate. The Cherokee were also forced to adopt their former slaves into the tribe and to allow white settlement of their lands.

  Monuments recognizing the Cherokee's wartime participation were dedicated in the early 20th century. The scale of what the Cherokee lost in Reconstruction stands as a direct result of Cooley's exploitation of the factions that men like Ross and Watie had spent the war years deepening.