Stand Watie

• 1. Introduction

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  Stand Watie held a distinction no other Confederate officer could claim. He was the only Native American to serve as a general in the Confederate Army. Between 1862 and 1866, he also served as the second principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. That role came after the Cherokee Nation itself entered an alliance with the Confederate States. Watie commanded Indian troops in the Trans-Mississippi Theater, soldiers drawn mostly from the Cherokee, Muskogee, and Seminole peoples. When the war finally ended, he was the last Confederate States Army general anywhere to give up the fight. Those bare facts sit on top of a much rougher story. The full story includes a Cherokee newspaper shut down by state militia, and a death sentence that spared only him among his own family. It also includes a peace delegation that Washington later refused to fully hear. The chapters ahead trace how that alliance split the Cherokee Nation, and what remained of Stand Watie's own family and fortune once the war was over.

• 2. A Name and a Newspaper

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  Stand Watie was born on the 12th of December 1806, at Oothcaloga in the Cherokee Nation, in what is now Calhoun, Georgia. His parents were Uwatie, a full-blood Cherokee whose name meant "the ancient one," and Susanna Reese, whose father was white and whose mother was Cherokee. The boy was named Degataga. According to one biography, that name translates to "standing firm" in English. His brothers were Gallagina, nicknamed "Buck," who later took the name Elias Boudinot, and Thomas Watie. The boys were close to their paternal uncle Major Ridge and his son John Ridge, both of whom became tribal leaders in their own right.

  By 1827, Watie's father David Uwatie had become a wealthy planter who held African-American slaves as laborers. After converting to Christianity with Moravian missionaries, David took his new name, and Degataga was renamed Isaac. Watie preferred a looser English rendering of his own name, "Stand," and the family eventually dropped the "U" from their surname, becoming simply Watie. Alongside his brothers and sisters, Watie learned to read and write English at the Moravian mission school in Spring Place, in what is now Georgia.

  Watie occasionally wrote articles for the Cherokee Phoenix, the newspaper his older brother Elias edited from 1828 to 1832. It was the first Native American newspaper, publishing in both Cherokee and English. Georgia's anti-Indian laws drew Watie into tribal politics after gold was discovered on Cherokee land in the north of the state, and thousands of white settlers moved in. Congress responded with the 1830 Indian Removal Act, ordering Indian nations relocated west of the Mississippi River. In 1832, Georgia seized most of the remaining Cherokee land despite federal protections meant to prevent it. State militia went further, destroying the Cherokee Phoenix's offices and press over its opposition to removal.

  In 1835, convinced that removal could no longer be stopped, Watie and his brother chose to negotiate a treaty rather than be forced out with nothing. They were among the Cherokee leaders who signed the Treaty of New Echota that year, a decision most of the tribe would never forgive.

• 3. A Cycle of Killing

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  In 1835, Stand Watie emigrated to Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma, along with his family and thousands of other Cherokee. They joined the "Old Settlers," Cherokee who had relocated as early as the 1820s. Those who had stayed on tribal land in the East were rounded up and forced west by the U.S. government in 1838, a journey that became known as the Trail of Tears. An estimated 4,000 people died along the way.

  On the 22nd of June 1839, the Cherokee national government sentenced Stand Watie, his brother Elias Boudinot, their uncle Major Ridge, and cousin John Ridge to death. The sentence invoked a tribal law that made giving up tribal land a "blood," or capital, offense. Watie was the only one of the men marked for execution who survived. He arranged for Elias's children to be sent to their mother's family in Connecticut for safety and education. Their mother Harriet had died in 1836, before the family's migration west.

  In 1842, Watie recognized James Foreman as one of the men who had killed his uncle, and killed him in turn. The act was part of a wider post-removal conflict within the tribe, one that brought the Cherokee close to civil war for years. Supporters of Chief John Ross killed Watie's brother Thomas in 1845 in retaliation. Watie stood trial in Arkansas in the 1850s for Foreman's killing and was acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. His nephew E. C. Boudinot, who had returned west to practice law, defended him.

  That same courtroom cycle of vengeance was about to be dwarfed by a war that would split the whole Cherokee Nation in two.

• 4. Chief Against Chief

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  In 1861, Principal Chief John Ross signed an alliance between the Cherokee Nation and the Confederate States, hoping to avoid disunity in Indian Territory. A majority of the Cherokee Nation initially backed the Confederacy for pragmatic reasons, fearing that the federal government might turn Indian Territory into a full state. Within less than a year, Ross and part of the National Council decided the alliance had been a disaster. In the summer of 1862, Ross moved the tribe's records to Union-held Kansas and traveled on to Washington to meet President Lincoln.

  After Ross fled to Federal-controlled territory, Watie replaced him as principal chief, while Tom Pegg took over as chief of the pro-Union Cherokee. In August 1862, once Ross's followers had formally declared for the Union and gone to Fort Leavenworth, the remaining pro-Confederate minority elected Watie principal chief in his own right. Following President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, Pegg called a special session of the Cherokee National Council. On the 18th of February 1863, that council passed a resolution freeing all slaves within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation.

  Watie later pushed for federal recognition of a distinct "Southern Cherokee Nation," a bid that never succeeded. Open warfare had already broken out between Union and Confederate Cherokee factions across Indian Territory, worsened by armed bands loyal to no side at all. Many Cherokee fled north to Kansas or south to Texas simply to escape the fighting. After the war ended, both factions sent separate delegations to Washington, but the federal government negotiated only with the Union-aligned leadership that had never recognized Watie's election.

• 5. The Cavalry Commander

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  In October 1861, Stand Watie was commissioned as colonel of what would become the 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles. He organized a regiment of mounted infantry and led it against Federal troops, but also turned it against rival Cherokee factions and against Creek and Seminole bands who backed the Union. At the Battle of Pea Ridge, in Arkansas, from the 6th to the 8th of March 1862, Watie's troops captured Union artillery positions under the overall command of General Benjamin McCulloch. They covered the Confederate retreat once Union forces took control of the field. Meanwhile, most of Colonel John Drew's Cherokee regiment defected to the Union side, though Drew, a nephew of Chief Ross, stayed loyal to the Confederacy.

  Watie was appointed to the grade of brigadier general on the 10th of May 1864, with a date of rank set to the 6th of May. He did not learn of the promotion until after he had already led an ambush on the steamboat J. R. Williams on the 16th of July 1864. As brigadier general, Watie commanded the First Indian Brigade of the Army of the Trans-Mississippi, made up of two regiments of Mounted Rifles and three battalions of Cherokee, Seminole, and Osage infantry. His forces reportedly fought in more battles west of the Mississippi River than any other unit, across Indian Territory, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Texas.

  On the 19th of September 1864, in what is now Mayes County, Oklahoma, Watie took part in the Second Battle of Cabin Creek, considered the greatest Confederate victory in Indian Territory. Alongside General Richard Montgomery Gano, he led a raid that captured a Federal wagon train worth approximately $1 million in wagons, mules, commissary supplies, and other goods. During that same raid, Watie's forces massacred black haycutters at Wagoner, Oklahoma. Union reports said his Indian cavalry "killed all the Negroes they could find," including wounded men.

  With most Cherokee now backing the Union, Watie's own family and other Confederate Cherokee took refuge in Rusk and Smith counties in east Texas for the rest of the war. The Confederate Army placed him in command of the Indian Division of Indian Territory in February 1865, though by then it could no longer fight there effectively. On the 23rd of June 1865, at Doaksville in the Choctaw Nation, Watie signed a cease-fire agreement with Union representatives on behalf of his command, the First Indian Brigade of the Army of the Trans-Mississippi. That September, after being demobilized, he traveled to Texas to see his wife Sallie and to mourn their son Comisky, who had died at age 15.

• 6. Freedom, Land, and a New Chief

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  After the war, Stand Watie served on the Cherokee delegation to the Southern Treaty Commission, which renegotiated the tribe's treaties with the United States. The U.S. government realized the Union and Confederate Cherokee factions would never agree on common terms. So it negotiated with the two sides separately, extracting concessions from both in the process. The resulting treaty required the Cherokee Nation to free its slaves. The Southern Cherokee wanted the government to pay for relocating the Cherokee Freedmen off their lands. The Northern Cherokee instead proposed adopting the Freedmen into the tribe. But the Northern Cherokee also wanted the federal government to set aside a separate piece of territory just for the Freedmen.

  The federal government instead granted the Cherokee Freedmen full rights to citizenship, land, and annuities equal to the Cherokee themselves, assigning them land in the Canadian addition. Chief John Ross signed the treaty on the 19th of July 1866. The U.S. Senate ratified it eight days later, on the 27th, just four days before Ross himself died. The Cherokee Nation, still divided over the treaty, elected Lewis Downing as its new principal chief, a full-blood Cherokee chosen as a compromise candidate. Downing proved a shrewd and politically savvy leader, working to reconcile and reunify the tribe.

  Watie had gone into exile in the Choctaw Nation after the treaty was signed. He returned to the Cherokee Nation shortly after Downing's election and largely stayed out of politics for his remaining years, focused instead on rebuilding his fortunes. He settled again at Honey Creek, where he died on the 9th of September 1871. He was buried in the old Ridge Cemetery, later called Polson's Cemetery, in what is now Delaware County, Oklahoma, as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. His wife Sarah outlived him, though not all of their children would.

• 7. Marriages and Losses

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  After settling in Indian Territory, Stand Watie married Sarah Bell on the 18th of September 1842; their two families had long been friends. Together they had three sons, Saladin, Solon, and Cumiska, and two daughters, Minnee and Jacqueline. Saladin died in 1868 while the family was living at Mount Tabor, also called Bellview, Texas, the home of Sarah's family, the Bells. Solon died the following year, and both daughters died not long after their father.

  Sarah herself died in 1884. One source states that Stand Watie in fact married four women over his lifetime: Eleanor Looney, Elizabeth Fields, Isabella Hicks, and Sarah Caroline Bell. His child with Elizabeth Fields was stillborn in 1836, years before his marriage to Sarah Bell. That earlier, largely unrecorded family history sits alongside the more public one Watie left behind in war and politics.

• 8. Watie in Memory

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  Stand Watie appears occasionally in Rifles for Watie, a 1957 novel by Harold Keith, which follows a young Union soldier from Kansas who meets Watie and his people in Tahlequah. He was also portrayed on screen in the 1953 film The Great Sioux Uprising, played by actor Glenn Strange. The song "Coyotes," recorded by Don Edwards, lists Watie alongside Comanches, outlaws, longhorns, Geronimo, and the red wolf as losses of the Old West. In The Outlaw Josey Wales, based on The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales and its sequel, the character Lone Watie, played by Chief Dan George, is described as a cousin of Stand Watie.

  On the 13th of June 2020, following the George Floyd protests, a 1921 monument to Stand Watie and a 1913 monument to Confederate soldiers were removed from the Cherokee Capitol grounds in Tahlequah. Cherokee Nation Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said the monuments came down because the Daughters of the Confederacy, not the Cherokee Nation, had commissioned and erected them. Both monuments were placed in storage by the Cherokee Nation.

  A 2007 Carolina Times article about Keith Ellison's decision to swear his oath of office on a copy of the Quran has since been misquoted in online Arab and Islamic news sources. Those sources cite it as confirming a "Ramadan Ibn Wati," a supposedly Muslim Cherokee chief said to be a contemporary of Stand Watie and father to a "Saladin Watie." The Carolina Times piece draws a direct line between Stand Watie and this invented figure, a myth that keeps attaching new fiction to a name already carried through a novel, a film, a song, and a screenplay.