Two days ago was June 19, and I decided to do some research on slavery, and write. I indeed found much to write on. I almost completed a writing on the Christian influence on promoting slavery. I wished to find a quote from a Native American on slavery to include in my writing. An internet search brought to a Cherokee chief who was himself a slave holder. I found this all so interesting I thought that this might be good enough to publish independently on the institution of American slavery. I will continue to look for an American Indian quote on the white man’s version of slavery for my original writing. But I encourage you to read over the excerpts I have included on this very interesting American history. You can follow the links for more in-depth coverage of this topic. I listen to a Native American podcast called Native Opinion. One of the two podcasters belongs to a southern tribe, and I understand his heritage more fully now. This is worth a reading in my opinion, although I’ve written little of it.
“The role of the Native Americans in ante-bellum society, the presence and contributions of Africans to Native American societies, the important story of Afro-Indians in the Old South, and the issues of Native American slavery have been relegated to the back pages of history.”
Below is from a dissertation found online focused on the Choctaw.
During the nineteenth century, Choctaw millionaire Robert M. Jones became one of the richest men in the American Southwest. After attending the Choctaw Academy in the late 1820s under the direction of Richard M. Johnson, the future vice president and self-proclaimed Tecumseh killer, Jones and his Choctaw brethren relocated to Indian Territory as part of federal Indian removal. Between the 1830s and the 1860s, he acquired between four and seven plantations, as many as 500 African slaves, multiple mansions, and a fleet of steamships which transported his cotton to markets throughout the United States. Other than these notable facts, historians know very little about Jones.
Upon briefly scratching the surface, I found ample fodder to classify Jones as the archetypal “mixed-blood” Indian. He converted to Christianity and maintained close relations with missionaries throughout his life. Missionaries rarely minced words about their desire to reshape Indian societies to the evolving American social and economic order through Christianity and education. Jones whole-heartedly fought for expanding American-style education throughout the Choctaw Nation. Further, he embraced racial slaveholding and many traditions characteristic of the white planter class in the American South. He did not look or act the part of a Choctaw—he dressed in New Orleans fashions, wore his hair short, went by his Welsh birth name even among Choctaws, and was an officer in the Freemasons. In addition to slave wealth, he partnered with American and French-Canadian investors to open stores throughout the Choctaw Nation and in Texas and Louisiana. As the Civil War approached, it was Jones who marched into the Choctaw General Council, intimidated Principal Chief George Hudson into abandoning plans for neutrality, and threatened to hang those who disagreed with a Confederate alliance. All the telltale signs—education, Christianization, racial slaveholding, and individual commercial wealth—indicated that Jones internalized colonial practices that threatened Choctaw cultural identity and political sovereignty.
Moreover, this study draws upon cutting-edge research in Barbara Krauthamer’s Black Slaves, Indian Masters, Christina Snyder’s Slavery in Indian Country, and Fay Yarbrough’s Race in the Cherokee Nation, to demonstrate the impact of race and slaveholding in the Choctaw Nation. Snyder argues that by 1830 Choctaws and other Southern Indians had developed a unique form of racial slavery that combined racial ideology with traditional forms of Native American captivity. By examining Jones and the role of race and slavery in the nineteenth century Choctaw Nation, my work demonstrates the growing divide between Choctaws who continued to practice traditional captivity versus those who favored the more brutal American peculiar institution. Moreover, my evaluation of codification of race and slavery complements observations made by Fay Yarbrough regarding race in the Cherokee Nation during the same period. Barbara Krauthammer’s recent study also provides an important foundation for examining the experiences of slaves and the nature of slaveholding within the Choctaw Nation. Rather than examining the Choctaw slave and freedmen experience separately, however, I integrate their history into the larger narrative of the Choctaw Nation during the nineteenth century.
A very informative site is found online describing in great detail the history of the southern Native Americans, and their connection with the Africans’ brought to the south. It is a very interesting and complex story which is worthwhile to read and understand in my estimation. I’ve bolded the most important sentences and only included some of the information from this website, in that I found the most interesting. The institution of slavery, the Christian church and the Masonic pseudo-religious practices all had its influence. It appears that much of Andrew Jackson’s relentless war against the southern indigenous was due to their relationship with the African slaves. The Indians were slave owners of Africans in some instances, but the tribes also were a safe haven for runaway slaves, and the Africans preferred being slaves to the Native Americans because they were treated so much better. I found a reference that the Indian masters would often work harder than the black slaves in bondage to them. The links are found below to the site.
Modern historians believe that the first Africans to be encountered by Native Americans were those who accompanied the early Spanish explorations of the Southeastern United States. Estavanico, "an Arabian black, native of Acamor," who accompanied Narvaez into Florida distinguished himself by his linguistic ability and "was in constant conversation" with the Indians.
Slavery as a phenomenon was not unknown to the Cherokee Nation or to Native Americans. However, it is distinctively different in both its content and its context as that which was practiced by the European. Rudi Halliburton in Red Over Black, his extensive work on slavery in the Cherokee Nation, concludes that "slavery, as an institution, did not exist among the Cherokees before the arrival or Europeans." Booker T. Washington concurs, "The Indians who first met the white man on his continent do not seem to have held slaves until they first learned to do so from him."
In spite of a later tendency in the Southern United States to differentiate the African slave from the Indian, African slavery was in actuality imposed on top of a preexisting system of Indian slavery. In North America, the two never diverged as distinctive institutions.
Indian slaves were considered to be "sullen, insubordinate, and short lived," A.B. Hart quoted in Sanford Wilson, "Indian Slavery in the South Carolina Region," Journal of Negro History 22 (1935), 440. The article further describes Native American slaves as "not of such robust and strong bodies, as to lift great burdens, and endure labor and slavish work." Native Americans were not without some commercial value. They were often seized throughout the South and taken to the slave markets and traded at an exchange rate of two for one for African Americans.
As Native American societies in the Southeast were primarily matrilineal, African males who married Native American women often became members of the wife's clan and citizens of the respective nation. As relationships grew, the lines of distinction began to blur and the evolution of red-black people began to pursue its own course; many of the people known as slaves, free people of color, Africans, or Indians were most often the product of integrating cultures. Among the people of the Chickamagua region of the Cherokee Nation and those who spoke the Kituwhan dialect, there was a particular "ethnic openness." The people native to this region were "more receptive to racial diversity within their towns than the mainstream Cherokees."
The term "Indian war" was quite often simply a rhetorical exercise to cover not only the seizure of Native American land and crops, but also the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
The efforts of the Carolinians to enslave the Indians, brought with them the natural and appropriate penalties. The Indians began to make their escape from slavery to the Indian Country. Their example was soon followed by the African Slaves, who also fled to the Indian Country, and, in order to secure themselves from pursuit continued their journey.
Charleston, and especially a group of men associated with an area north of Charleston known as the "Goose Creek men," became the center of this North American commercial slavery enterprise. Native American nations throughout the South were played one against the other in an orgy of slave dealing that decimated entire peoples; during the latter half of the seventeenth century, Carolina was more active than any other colony in the exportation of Indian slaves. The Indian slave trade in the Carolinas, with Charleston as its center, rapidly took on all of the characteristics of the African slave trade. The Carolinians formed alliances with coastal native groups, armed them, and encouraged them to make war on weaker tribes deeper in the Carolina interior.
By the late years of the seventeenth century, caravans of Indian slaves were making their way from the Carolina backcountry to forts on the coast just as they were doing on the African continent. Once in Charleston, the captives were loaded on ships for the "middle passage" to the West Indies or other colonies such as New Amsterdam or New England. Many of the Indian slaves were kept at home and worked on the plantations of South Carolina; by 1708, the number of Indian slaves in the Carolinas was nearly half that of African slaves.
In the middle to latter part of the eighteenth century, white colonists began to recognize that, especially in areas such as South Carolina and Georgia where Africans and Indians outnumbered whites 4 to 1, a great need existed "to make Indians & Negro's a checque upon each other least by their Vastly Superior Numbers, we should be crushed by one or the other." In 1775, John Stuart, a senior British official, complained "nothing can be more alarming to the Carolinians then the idea of an attack from Indians and Negroes;" he further believed that "any intercourse between Indians and Negroes in my opinion ought to be prevented as much as possible." William Willis, in his "Divide and Rule: Red, White, and Black in the Southeast," believed that one of the main reasons that Indian slavery was curtailed in the colonies was related to white fears of an alliance between Native Americans and African immigrants.
The colonists' fears were not without basis; Native Americans and Africans had begun to form alliances and pathways to Native America were followed by African runaways. Nearby maroon communities, as well as Indians and Blacks from Spanish territory, harassed isolated settlers; the threat of violence became real as slave revolts spread throughout the Carolina frontier. Though the Stono rebellion of 1739 is described as a "slave revolt," there is little doubt that many of those enslaved at Stono were Native Americans; the very name Stono itself comes from a Native American nation enslaved by the Carolinians.
South Carolina Governor James Glen believed that white security depended upon creating hatred between the races, as "it has always been the policy of this govert to creat an aversion in them [Indians] to Negroes."
The Muskogees and the Seminoles granted the Africans much greater freedom, even when they were referred to as "slaves." Africans among the Muskogees could own property, travel freely from town to town, and marry into the family of their "owner." Often, the children of a Muskogee's African American slaves were free, and often African American Muskogees became traditional leaders among the people or even a chief. Among the Seminoles, there was even greater freedom. The blacks lived set apart to themselves, managing their own stocks and crops, paying only tributes to their "owners." The Africans could own property, moved about with freedom, and allowed to arm themselves. According to contemporary sources, the Seminoles "would almost sooner sell his child as his slave," and that "there exists a law among Seminoles, forbidding individuals from selling their negroes to white people."
Without a doubt, the Trail of Tears fell hardest upon those thousand African Americans were forced to march, many without shoes, through the dead of winter into Oklahoma. The newspaper reports of the time detailed a "peaceful and deathless trek of the Cherokees," but missionary Elizur Butler estimated conservatively that over 4600 Native Americans and African Americans died on that nine-month march. More recent estimates put the number of deaths at nearly 8,000 people who died as a more or less direct result of the Cherokee Trail of Tears. An estimate of the number of African Americans who died on the Cherokee Trail of Tears could be as much as one-fourth of those who made the trek west.
Among the Muskogee and Seminoles where not only were relationships with Africans quite deep but where Africans played prominent roles in their society, the question of removal was very serious. The Africans among the Southern Indians knew that they were the property of men from whom they, or their ancestors, had fled, that the burden of proof lay upon them, and that their losing to the United States government meant they would become the property of whoever claimed them. In 1836, simultaneous wars were initiated by the United States government to remove the Muskogee and their relative the Seminoles from their lands in the deep South. The process was not completed until the commitment of nearly forty thousand troops, ten years, forty million dollars, and fifteen hundred soldiers lives later. The removal of the Muskogees, Seminoles, and their African counterparts was the costliest war in American history until the Civil War.
Let us make no mistake about the nature of this endeavor. As General Jessup, the leader of the campaign stated it in 1836, "This, you may be assured, is a negro, not an Indian war: and if it be not speedily put down, the South will feel the effects of it on their slave population before the end of the next season." Joshua Giddings saw the war in a similar light; the Second Seminole War was "on our part had not been commenced for the attainment of any high or noble purpose...Our national influence and military power had been put forth to reenslave our fellow men: to transform immortal beings into chattels; and to make them to property of slave holders; to oppose the rights of human nature; and the legitimate fruits of this policy were gathered in a plentiful harvest of crime, bloodshed, and individual suffering."
The Indians were led in their resistance by the same Afro-Indian leaders who had fled deep into Florida to escape from slavery: Jim-Boy, Gopher John, The Negro Abraham, Cudjo, Wild Cat, and many others led the Indians in their struggle for resistance. Those leaders of the Muskogee and Seminole such as Opothle Yahola, Micanopy, and Osceola (Asi Yahola) were religious leaders who had deep ties to the African American communities in their presence. In the Spring of 1837, General Jessup reasserted his position, "Throughout my operations I found the Negroes the most active and determined warriors; and during the conference with the Indian chiefs I ascertained that they exercised almost controlling influence over them."
In the late 1820's, the abolitionist movement spread within the Cherokee Nation of North Carolina. The Cherokee American Colonization Society formed in 1828 as an auxiliary of the African Colonization Society. Reverend David Brown, a mixed blood preacher, spoke for many Cherokee in 1825 when he said, "There are some Africans among us... they are generally well treated and they much prefer living in the nation as a residence in the United States...The presumption is that the Cherokees will, at no distant date, cooperate with the humane efforts of those who are liberating and sending this prescribed race to the land of their fathers."
If one looks closely at the statement above, we find that the colonial Virginia fathers were equally concerned about intermarriage or relationships with "Indians" or "mulattos" as they were with those between colonials and African Americans. The presence of Native Americans and those with mixed blood were of seeming importance at this point in American history; later historians were the write these individuals out of history in order to perpetuate the black and white "master-narrative" that became the linchpin of Southern history. The role of the Native Americans in ante-bellum society, the presence and contributions of Africans to Native American societies, the important story of Afro-Indians in the Old South, and the issues of Native American slavery have been relegated to the back pages of history.
With the establishment of the first model farms and missions among the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeastern United States, a key tool used in this civilization process was the implementation of African slaves as laborers in the building and operation of the model farms and missions. The missionaries, however, saw the issue of slavery as a political one and not a question to which they were bound to respond to religiously. Besides, as the missionaries were quick to point out, it was not their fault.
In The Story of the Negro, Professor Booker T. Washington states, "The association of the negro with the Indian has been so intimate and varied on this continent, and the similarities as well as the differences of their fortunes and characters are so striking that I am tempted to enter at some length into a discussion of their relations of each to the other, and to the white man in this country."
The Cherokee atsi nahtsa'i, or "one who is owned," were individuals captured or obtained through warfare with neighboring peoples and often given to clans who lost members in warfare. To the extent that these individuals existed outside of the clan structure, they were in essence "outsiders" who lived on the periphery of Cherokee society. It was up to the clan-mothers, or "beloved women" of the Nation to decide upon the fate of these individuals. If they accepted these "outsiders" as replacements for those individuals who had lost their lives in battle, these individuals became members of the clan and thus the nation. If the "outsiders" were not accepted into the clan, then they served as the "other" in promoting clan self-understanding and solidarity.
There was not a race-based understanding of "difference" within Native American cultures as that which had come to exist within the European mind over the hundred years following the discovery of the New World. Race as an identifying component in interaction did not exist within the traditional nations of the early Americas; into the nineteenth century the Cherokee were noted for their cultural accommodation.
The years 1846-1855 continued to be prosperous ones for the Cherokee Nation, but they were years where the issue of slavery moved from the background of the factional struggle between conservatives and progressives and came to eclipse all other issues that beset this new nation. The number of slaves within the Cherokee nation had grown immensely in the years following removal; in 1839 slaves represented ten percent of the Nation, by 1860 they represented nearly twenty-five percent. The 4,000 slaves in the Cherokee Nation were owned by ten percent of the population. The slave revolts among the Cherokee in 1842, in 1846, and in 1850 solidified the Cherokee elite in the belief of the efficacy and importance of slavery.
A few years later, another group of Cherokee slaves attempted to flee their masters and seek refuge among a group of Afro-Indians from the Creek and Seminole Nation led by Chief Wildcat. Chief Wildcat, the Negro Abraham, Luis Pacheco, and their band of renegades fled through Texas and formed a free community just across the Rio Grande in Mexico. A posse of slaveowners from Indian Territory surrounded the slaves and captured most of them. William Drew, brother of John Drew stated that “the Negroes talked like fighting, but when we got there, they had no fight in them, and most of them ran off and put us to a great deal of trouble to gather them up. We collected 300...There were a good many of these Negroes that had been sold, or went off to live with Wildcat.” Many fugitive slaves from the Cherokee Nation remained within the Indian Territory and settled among the Seminole and Upper Creek who had historically been receptive to runaway slaves.
On October 16, 1859, John Brown and his cadre of abolitionists raided Harper's Ferry with the expectation of instigating a slave revolt which would spread throughout the South and turn the tide of the struggle against slavery. Though the incident was in Virginia, its implications were felt throughout the land. Abolitionists moved from being a threat to the institution of slavery to a threat to the internal security of the country. Rhetorical abolitionism was a problem for the political authorities; militant abolitionism became an issue for the military ones.
In 1855, the issue of slavery began to be an even more troublesome issue in the Cherokee Nation and for the first time a concern for "Southern Rights" arose among the wealthy mixed-blood element in the Cherokee Nation. John Ross tried to maintain a position of neutrality, but this became exceedingly difficult considering the location of the Cherokee Nation between the deep South and “bleeding Kansas.” It was especially difficult considering the power and affinities of the Cherokee aristocracy. John Ross, being a slaveholder, tried to quiet the controversy over slavery by publicly distancing himself from “abolitionist” forces associated with the Northern missionaries. In the eighteen fifties, he left the Congregational Church to attend a Southern Methodist congregation so that he might be seen as less controversial.
Though many people give credit to the Baptist missionaries for espousing abolition among the Cherokee, the notions of liberty and egalitarianism extended far back into Cherokee history. Prior to contact with whites, there was no evidence to support any racial identity based prejudice or mistreatment within the Cherokee Nation. Many of the fullbloods having been slaves themselves in the colonial period and having seen the destructive influences of the slave trade among their own people, it is likely that opposition to slavery existed prior to contact with abolitionist ministers. Finally, the deep historical relationship between fullbloods and Africans that existed with both the temple mound based cultures and the Protestant churches of the Southeastern United States would have even further supported a society based upon freedom and liberty. Finally, the Keetoowah Society believed that the more the Cherokee Nation disestablished its ties with the institution of slavery, the better it could sustain its own national identity and control its own sovereignty.
So that ends the foray into this part of American history primarily lost upon many except within the tribes and academia. I hope you enjoyed it.
38th Posting, June 21, 2023