Choctaw in the American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Choctaw in the American Civil War fought on two separate fronts, in two separate worlds, separated by the Mississippi River. To the west, the Choctaw Nation had spent thirty years rebuilding after the forced removal that followed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830. To the east, the Mississippi Choctaw had stayed behind under treaty provisions, trading their tribal homeland for a sharecropper's existence. When the war came, both groups would ultimately cast their lot with the Confederate States of America. Why they did so, and what it cost them, is a story of neglect, economic entanglement, conscription, and the hard calculations of survival. The story runs from the cotton fields of the Choctaw Nation to the prisoner parks of New York City, from the smoke of Pea Ridge to the surrender at Doaksville.

• 2. Two Nations, One Name

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  Robert M. Jones was the most famous Choctaw planter of his era. Part Choctaw by blood, he had become influential in politics, owned many slaves, and would eventually serve as a non-voting member in the Confederacy's House of Representatives. His story captures the world the Choctaw Nation had built in the three decades after removal. Angie Debo, author of The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic, wrote that the years from 1833 to 1861 presented "a record of orderly development almost unprecedented in the history of any people." By 1860 the nation had established itself through agriculture, education, and slave labor. Its upper class was tied into the cotton trade with networks reaching as far as New Orleans.

  The Mississippi Choctaw, by contrast, led what the source describes plainly as a tough existence. Through the provisions of the same 1830 treaty, they had elected to stay in Mississippi while the majority moved west. Decades of petitioning the United States over land grants provided in Article 14 of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek had produced little result. Most cases brought before U.S. courts went unheard. The luckiest among them had a sympathetic white patron. By the time the war arrived, destitution was their condition, not their exception.

• 3. Lincoln's Abandonment

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  Abraham Lincoln considered Indian affairs a low priority compared to the secession crisis of early 1861. His administration had little time to consider the role Native nations might play in the coming conflict. The attitude that did emerge was grim: Lincoln and his circle viewed the Indian as a "dying race." A U.S. senator expressed this view in stark terms, calling their decline a natural consequence of "contact with a superior race inhabiting the same country."

  By the 18th of May 1861, U.S. military posts in Indian Country had been abandoned, leaving tribes, in the words used at the time, with "no alternative but to join the South." Confederate envoy Albert Pike moved quickly into that vacuum. He negotiated treaties across what was then called Indian Country and later commanded a combined force of Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole troops. The Choctaw Nation had initially tried to stay neutral. In April 1861, Choctaw officials in Washington City assured Unionists of their neutrality. By June of that same year, the nation had declared itself free and independent and sent commissioners to make an alliance with the Confederacy.

• 4. Reasons for the Alliance

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  The Choctaw Nation's General Council moved in early February 1861, instructing their delegates in Washington City to deposit invested funds in southern banks if necessary. A few days later, the council sent twelve delegates to meet with the Chickasaw at Boggy Depot, Choctaw Nation. Five factors pulled the nation toward the Confederacy: a belief that the United States was on the verge of collapse; years of neglect by the federal government; the open advocacy by Secretary of State William H. Seward for seizing Indian lands; a main Indian agent who favored the South; and tribal laws that supported slavery.

  The Mississippi Choctaw had a distinct set of pressures. Land grant grievances under Article 14 of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek had festered for decades with no relief from U.S. courts. A fifty-dollar bounty was offered to Mississippi Choctaws who enrolled with the Provisional Army of the Confederate States. Many soldiers were not volunteers at all. A majority of Mississippi Choctaw soldiers were conscripted into Confederate service. Some may also have been drawn by the social reward that warfare historically offered in their culture: success in battle was a path to leadership and standing within the tribe.

• 5. Soldiers in Indian Territory

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  On the 1st of August 1861, President Jefferson Davis received word that the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles was ready for battle. The regiment was commanded by Colonel Douglas H. Cooper and mustered six Choctaw companies, three Chickasaw companies, and one company described as "half-breed." Total strength reached 1,400 men.

  The enthusiasm of the early enlistments did not last long. When Confederate Brigadier General Albert Pike authorized the raising of regiments in the fall of 1860, Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees responded with what Civil War historian Webb Garrison called "considerable enthusiasm." That enthusiasm began to evaporate when neither arms nor pay arrived. A disgusted Confederate officer later acknowledged that "with the exception of a partial supply for the Choctaw regiment, no tents, clothing, or camp and garrison equippage was furnished to any of them."

  Multiple Choctaw units eventually took shape in Indian Territory. Franceway Battice, also recorded as Francois Baptiste or Faunceway Baptiste, led the First Choctaw Battalion Cavalry, which may have had 216 men. After Battice resigned in early 1862, the unit reorganized as the First Choctaw War Regiment. Jackson McCurtain became lieutenant colonel of his own First Choctaw Battalion in 1862; that unit was later reorganized as the Third Choctaw Regiment. The First Choctaw Regiment, organized in early 1862 under Colonel Sampson Folsom, eventually saw action at the first Battle of Newtonia on the 30th of September 1862. A total of 31 officers and 686 soldiers served in that regiment until June 1865.

• 6. Mississippi Choctaw at War

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  John W. Pierce and Samuel G. Spann, both white planters with experience among the Mississippi Indians, organized the Mississippi Choctaw as Confederates beginning in 1862. In the summer of that year, eighty-two Mississippians had already petitioned Governor John J. Pettus urging the conscription of the Indians. The Indians' first mission was tracking down deserters, most of them found in Jones County. Pierce's troops were soon fighting in Louisiana, along the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern Railroad.

  President Jefferson Davis endorsed Pierce's 1st Choctaw Battalion in February 1863. The unit was headquartered at Newton Station, Mississippi and fell under Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton's department in Brigadier General John Adams's 4th District. Only two companies were mustered, totaling 101 men in March 1863. The battalion formed in February and disbanded in May 1863.

  In February 1863, before the battalion was even fully constituted, Choctaw soldiers newly recruited days or weeks earlier led rescue and recovery efforts after the Chunky Creek Train Wreck. Samuel Spann wrote years afterward that "the passengers were rescued due to their heroic acts."

  Samuel G. Spann had started the war as a private in William Boyles' Dragoons. After a year he provided a substitute and joined General William J. Hardee's command as an aide. In 1862, he contacted several Mississippi Choctaw settlements to recruit, likely meeting with tribal headmen including Incoshubba, Oneshehatta, Tonubba, Meashomba, Tomashuba, and Luockhoma. While waiting for the Indians to recover from measles, Spann joined Hardee's campaign into Kentucky and participated in the Battle of Perryville. His headquarters were eventually based at Mobile, Alabama, with a recruiting camp in Newton County, Mississippi.

• 7. Prisoners in New York

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  In the spring of 1863, Indian troops were sent to Louisiana as reinforcements to Colonel Horace H. Miller's command at Ponchatoula. Newspapers of the time credited those Indian troops with pushing back Union forces during the Battle of Ponchatoula on the 24th through the 26th of March 1863. Afterward, a large number deserted because they had not been paid. During or after Grierson's Raid in April or May 1863, more members of the 1st Choctaw Battalion likely fled.

  Then came a capture that drew national attention. A Union reconnoitering party raided the Confederate camp near Ponchatoula and seized around two dozen Indians and one white commissioned officer. Spann described what followed: the captured Indians were carried to New Orleans, then shipped by steamboat to Castle Williams near New York City. At Madison Park, they were displayed, in Spann's words, as "curiosities for the sport of sight-seers." At least two Indian prisoners died while imprisoned at the Union prison on Governors Island. The 1st Choctaw Battalion was formally ordered disbanded on the 9th of May 1863. Members who were still free petitioned officials in Richmond to be transferred to Spann's Battalion of Independent Scouts. Spann's battalion was itself disbanded on the 6th of November 1863, though Spann continued service with his Choctaw Indians. The unit was later reorganized as Alabama's 18th Confederate Cavalry, with only two companies remaining.

• 8. Surrender and What Followed

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  On the 19th of June 1865, Principal Chief Peter P. Pitchlynn surrendered at Doaksville, Choctaw Nation, ending Choctaw military service in the Trans-Mississippi Theater. The Union held the territory until a formal peace treaty could be signed. The following spring, the Southern Treaty Commission produced the 1866 Treaty with the Choctaw and Chickasaw, a document of 51 articles. It declared permanent peace, granted amnesty for siding with the Confederacy, and abolished slavery. The Choctaw delegation included Campbell LeFlore, John Page, James Riley, Alfred Wade, and Allen Wright; also present were Pitchlynn and Douglas H. Cooper. The treaty was proclaimed in July 1866.

  In Mississippi and Alabama, the last Indian Confederates surrendered in May 1865. Jack Amos, who in his Mississippi pension stated he first enrolled in April 1861, was among the veterans who attended postwar reunions. In 1903, Spann and some Indian veterans traveled to the New Orleans reunion, where a Louisiana journalist interviewed Amos. The journalist described him as a "full-blooded Choctaw Indian" who was seventy-three years old and entered into the reunion "with a fine enthusiasm." Amos died a few years later, in 1906.

  Reconstruction fell hard on the Choctaw Nation. The nation faced loss of vast tracts of land, the unrestricted colonization of freedmen among them, and the end of their autonomous tribal government. The Choctaw Freedmen, not long after emancipation, were described as "homeless and penniless." U.C.V. Camp Dabney H. Maury, organized in Newton, Mississippi with Samuel G. Spann as its commander, planned to erect a monument to the Mississippi Choctaws' wartime participation. That monument was never built. Decades later, state historical markers were placed at many of the sites Camp Maury had hoped to commemorate.