Native Americans in the American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  An estimated 20,000 Native Americans fought in the Civil War, serving in both Union and Confederate armies. Some reached the rank of general. Others worked as scouts, river pilots, and saboteurs behind enemy lines.

  The Trail of Tears had already shown many Native communities what federal promises were worth. Most tribes had little reason to join what many openly called a "white man's war." Yet the war found them anyway. It swept through Indian Territory with a ferocity that matched anything seen in Virginia or Tennessee. It split the same nation against itself. And it placed conditions and promises before Native communities on both sides that few could have anticipated.

  What drove twenty thousand people to take up arms in a conflict so many had tried to avoid? And what did it ultimately cost them?

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• 2. Caught Between Armies

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  In March 1861, Confederate President Jefferson Davis appointed Albert Pike as his envoy to the Five Civilized Tribes. Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma, sat directly between Union and Confederate lands. It was home to the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee Nations. Davis sent Pike to forge military alliances that would shield Confederate lines from Union incursions out of Kansas. Most nations eventually signed treaties with the Confederacy, often under pressure from wealthy, slave-holding factions within their own communities. But these alliances were never unanimous. Large portions of the same tribes opposed slavery and wanted no part of American political warfare.

  Cherokee Principal Chief John Ross initially tried to hold a position of neutrality. Stand Watie led the Confederate Treaty Party. Creek chief Opothleyahola gathered what became known as the Loyal Indians, leading refugees and escaped slaves toward Union-held Kansas.

  The Confederate treaty with the Cherokee Nation came with specific terms. The Confederacy promised protection, rations, tools, and a congressional delegate. In exchange, the Cherokee would provide ten mounted companies. General Ben McCulloch organized two Cherokee regiments under John Drew and Stand Watie. Drew and Watie had been longstanding rivals, and commanders deliberately kept their units apart.

  For the Choctaw, the conflict carried a particular resonance. Confederate records show strong enlistment among Choctaw men, and recent research suggests their involvement was more extensive than historians had previously recognized. Warfare had long been tied to male identity within Choctaw culture. Reduced intertribal conflict in earlier decades had shifted expressions of manhood toward education and diplomacy. The Civil War gave Choctaw soldiers a chance to reassert older ideals through combat, while also defending tribal sovereignty.

  At the Battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862, the split within the Cherokee Nation would produce one of the war's most dramatic defections.

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• 3. Cherokee Against Cherokee

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  John Drew's 2nd Cherokee Mounted Rifles fought under the Confederate flag at the Battle of Pea Ridge on the 7th and the 8th of March 1862. Before it was over, Drew's regiment defected en masse to Union forces in Kansas, joining the Indian Home Guard.

  Drew's rival, Stand Watie, showed no such wavering. In mid-1862, Union troops captured John Ross, the principal chief who had tried to keep the Cherokee out of the war. Ross was paroled and spent the remainder of the war in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, advocating Cherokee support for the Union. With Ross absent, Watie was elected principal chief and immediately conscripted all Cherokee men between the ages of 18 and 50 into Confederate service.

  Watie specialized in hit-and-run tactics and proved one of the war's most effective guerrilla commanders. In May 1864, he was promoted to brigadier general. He led the Indian Cavalry Brigade, a mixed force of Cherokee, Creek, Osage, and Seminole units. On the 10th of June 1864, his forces captured the Union steamboat J.R. Williams at Pleasant Bluff. Later that year, a raid at the Second Battle of Cabin Creek yielded 129 wagons and 740 mules.

  When the war ended, Watie became the last Confederate general to surrender. He laid down his arms in June 1865, well after Robert E. Lee and Kirby Smith had done so.

  The Cherokee Nation paid an enormous price for its Confederate alignment. Its population fell from roughly 21,000 in 1861 to about 15,000 by 1865. Despite earlier promises of amnesty, the U.S. government declared the entire Nation disloyal after the war and stripped it of its treaty rights.

  The Delaware Nation, meanwhile, had already committed 170 of its 201 eligible men to the Union Army by October 1861.

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• 4. The Delaware Stand

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  In January 1862, U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs William P. Dole issued a call for broader Native recruitment. The response produced the 1st and 2nd Indian Home Guard regiments. These units drew soldiers from the Delaware, Creek, Seminole, Kickapoo, Seneca, Osage, Shawnee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw nations.

  In October 1862, Delaware cavalrymen played a key role in the capture of the Wichita Agency. They killed five Confederate agents, seized a rebel flag, captured currency and ponies, and destroyed enemy supplies.

  The Home Guard regiments operated under a divided command structure. White officers held overall command, while Native American leaders ran individual companies. Over time, administrative duties shifted entirely to white officers, partly because widespread illiteracy among Native troops made paperwork difficult. Indigenous leaders continued to command in battle, where their authority was most respected.

  Desertions were frequent across the Home Guard regiments, which struggled to adapt to formal military discipline. Some soldiers treated government-issued firearms as personal property, using them for hunting or sport. The War Department responded by deducting replacement ammunition costs directly from soldiers' pay.

  While the Home Guard campaigned across Indian Territory, Native Americans far to the east were also choosing sides. Colonel William Holland Thomas was organizing Eastern Band Cherokee into a Confederate force in the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina.

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• 5. The Eastern Fronts

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  Almost every adult Catawba male in South Carolina enlisted in Confederate service. They served in the 5th, 12th, or 17th South Carolina Volunteer Infantry of the Army of Northern Virginia. Catawba soldiers distinguished themselves at the Peninsula Campaign, at Second Manassas, and at Antietam. They later endured the grinding lines of the Siege of Petersburg. A monument in Columbia commemorates their service. The casualties, however, were severe enough to threaten the survival of the Catawba community as a whole.

  Colonel William Holland Thomas commanded a Confederate guerrilla force known as Thomas' Legion. His Eastern Band Cherokee operated in the mountain passes of Tennessee and North Carolina. Alongside them, roughly 200 Cherokee served in a unit known as the Junaluska Zouaves.

  The Pamunkey of Virginia and the Lumbee of North Carolina aligned with the Union. The Pamunkey provided civilian and naval piloting for Union vessels. The Lumbee carried out guerrilla operations in the region. Members of the Iroquois Nation served in Company K of the 54th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment. Powhatan guides acted as river pilots and scouts for the Army of the Potomac.

  Native Americans who enlisted in U.S. Colored Troops were classified simply as "colored." Records show that many Pequot from New England fought in the 31st United States Colored Infantry Regiment and other Black regiments.

  Company K of the 1st Michigan Sharpshooters Regiment comprised predominantly Odawa, Delaware, Oneida, Potawatomi, and Ojibwa soldiers. Assigned to the Army of the Potomac as Ulysses S. Grant took command, Company K fought at the Battle of the Wilderness. They also saw action at Spotsylvania Court House. At one engagement near Petersburg, they captured 600 Confederate soldiers at Shand House. Their final engagement came at the Battle of the Crater on the 30th of July 1864. Cut off and running low on ammunition, the soldiers faced a desperate end. A lieutenant later recounted what followed: the dying soldiers pulled their blouses over their faces and chanted a death song. They died together in a group.

  In Colorado Territory that same year, Governor John Evans was pressing President Lincoln for authorization to move against Plains tribes.

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• 6. Sand Creek

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  President Lincoln approved Evans's request in 1864, authorizing the 3rd Colorado Infantry Regiment. Its stated purpose was to fight hostile Indians in the territory. Evans had grown concerned that Plains tribes might arm and unite as Union forces were pulled east.

  Cheyenne chiefs Black Kettle and White Antelope had already met with territorial authorities in Denver. They agreed to bring non-combatants to Fort Lyon for protection, removing any apparent pretext for military action against them.

  On the 29th of November 1864, Colonel John Chivington's troops swept into a peaceful encampment near Big Sandy Creek at dawn. The camp held roughly 500 Cheyenne and Arapaho, many of them unarmed women and children. Witnesses recounted widespread killings, mutilations, and sexual violence. Estimates place the dead between 160 and 200.

  A subsequent Congressional inquiry determined that Chivington had acted without authorization and recommended his removal. No criminal charges were ever filed.

  In the aftermath, many survivors joined the militant Dog Soldiers band. Their resistance spread, accelerating conflict across the southern Plains.

  The survivors who joined the Dog Soldiers proved among the most determined opponents federal forces would face on the Plains in the years ahead.

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• 7. Promises Broken

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  Unlike formerly enslaved people, who received legal protections through the Reconstruction Amendments, Native Americans remained classified as "domestic dependent nations." The Fourteenth Amendment continued to exclude "Indians not taxed" from full citizenship.

  In the years after 1865, the U.S. government intensified military campaigns against Native peoples across the West. Phillip Sheridan and William Tecumseh Sherman oversaw these efforts, drawing on command experience shaped by the Civil War. President Ulysses S. Grant presided over policies that steadily expanded federal control over tribal lands.

  The postwar treaties imposed on the Five Civilized Tribes treated them as belligerents, regardless of which side their members had supported. This precedent made it easier for the federal government to intervene in tribal affairs and divide their lands among white settlers.

  By 1882, military operations against Native Americans consumed the vast majority of the War Department's budget and personnel. The Civil War had not resolved questions of Native sovereignty. It had sharpened the tools the federal government would use to pursue those questions for decades to come.

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