Despite nearly a century of negative experiences in dealing with U. S. government institutions, Native Americans actively participated in the American Civil War. More than 20,000 Native Americans fought in the war within the Union and Confederate armies, their reservations were turned into battlefields, and their homes and property were often destroyed. In some nations as many as one in four soldiers died from battle wounds. As soldiers, Native Americans fought in lesser known battles in the trans-Mississippi West as well as in the eastern theater at the Battles oF Second Bull Run, Antietam, and the Wilderness, the Petersburg campaign, and Sherman’s March through Georgia. As nations, the conflict provided new opportunities to pursue long-standing goals, and it also reinvigorated long-standing political divisions. In the end, however, the Civil War resulted in the further dispossession of lands and the further deterioration of self-rule.
At the Civil War’s outset most Native Americans proclaimed their neutrality. Recognizing that the United States was preoccupied with the war, they took the opportunity to chase unwanted Christian missionaries and American agents out of their territories. Others hoped that the war would weaken the ability of the United States to further dispossess them of their lands. As the Civil War continued, at least for many Indians, neutrality became less possible and desirable. Rather than something to avoid, the Civil War became an opportunity to protect their self-interests.
When federal agents abandoned the Indian Territory in 1861, many Native Americans were receptive to Confederate agents and the alliances and offers of protection that they proposed. In summer 1861 the Confederacy had treaties with various Indian nations, including the Five Civilized Tribes (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole), as well as the Caddo, Osage, Quapaw, Seneca, Shawnee, and Wichita. The Confederacy also had alliances with some Indians who lived within the South. The Catawba nation in South Carolina, for example, enthusiastically supported the Confederacy, with nearly all of its eligible men enlisted.
The decision to support the Confederacy did not merely result from an attachment to slavery. Although several Indian nations had sizable slave populations, their alliances with the Confederacy were also based on other needs. The Confederacy promised that it would assume all federal obligations to Native nations, guaranteed Indian self-determination, offered to protect the nations from invasion, allowed Indians to define citizenship for themselves, and asked for Indian representatives in the Confederate Congress. Such terms convinced Native Americans in the desirability of an alliance and the subsequent providing of troops for Confederate defenses. Other issues convinced individual Indians to participate. The Confederate army offered employment, often paid a bounty to those who enlisted, and provided an opportunity to prove in war one’s manly virtue.
Other Native Americans pursued their self-interests by supporting the United States. By 1862, for example, 170 of the 201 men eligible for service in the Delaware Nation had enlisted in the Union army. Although the Delaware later signed a treaty of amity with the Confederacy, most Delaware Indians continued to support the Union war effort, especially as scouts. The Ottawa and Ojibwa Indians kept their distance from the war for its first two years. In 1863, however, they began to enlist in the “First Michigan Sharpshooters.” Some Indians who remained in the Southeast, especially the Pamunkey in Virginia and the Lumbee in North Carolina, used the Civil War to further resist attempts by Southern states to limit tribal sovereignty. By joining the Union army, they sought to protect their communities and voice their opposition to the racist policies of their Southern neighbors. Throughout the war, Pamunkey men served as pilots on federal boats and Lumbee soldiers served as guerrilla warriors, especially as William T. Sherman’s men marched through the Carolinas. Other Union supporters left their nations and enlisted in the army as individuals. Seneca Indian Ely S. Parker, for example, became adjutant general in the Union army and assistant to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.
The alliances with the Confederacy resulted in the formation of four Native American regiments. The regiments, which originally comprised nearly 5,000 members of the Five Civilized Tribes, fell under the command of Col. Douglas Cooper. Later in the war, soldiers from the other Indian nations joined the regiments, and the number of Confederate Indians in the western theater alone surpassed 10,000. Even as the regiments were formed, however, dissent within the nations continued. Tribal leaders signed treaties but did not have the power to enforce compliance within the nations. As a result, the Confederate Indian regiments focused much of their efforts on the Civil War atmosphere within Native communities, especially within the Cherokee Nation.
By late 1861 the Confederate Indians had forced most supporters of neutrality in the Indian Territory to flee to Kansas. With the supporters of neutrality temporarily out of the way, several regiments of Confederate Indians joined Union troops in a series of battles. Their participation, however, magnified the distrust between Indian and white soldiers in both Confederate and Union camps. In several instances, especially after the Battle of Pea Ridge, Native troops found themselves accused of scalping and committing other “savage” atrocities.
In June 1862, most of the Native American refugees in Kansas abandoned their stance of neutrality. They formed two Union regiments, invaded the Cherokee Nation, and captured the capital of Tahlequah and Fort Gibson. As a result, the Union gained the allegiance of many former Confederate Cherokee. The Confederate Cherokee forced the Union supporters to withdraw back to Kansas, and the Civil War in the Indian Territory continued. The following year, at the Cowskin Prairie Council, the pro-Union Cherokee denounced the Confederate Cherokee, invalidated their treaty with the Confederacy, abolished slavery, and elected a new chief, Thomas Pegg. That spring, with the support of federal troops, they went back on the offensive. They forced the Confederates out
Indian Territory and the Civil War
Of the Cherokee Nation and recaptured Fort Gibson and Tahlequah. Later that summer, federal troops destroyed a munitions depot in the Choctaw Nation and then captured Fort Smith, Arkansas.
The final year of the Civil War was its most destructive for Native Americans in the western theater. Union and Confederate sympathizers burned homes, slaughtered and stole livestock, and destroyed other forms of property. Guerrilla-style raids destroyed supply lines, and members of both armies took vengeance on each other.
Although Parker, the Seneca aide to Grant, drafted Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865, the Civil War did not immediately end for Native Americans. Three months later, on July 14, the Chickasaw and Caddo finally surrendered. In the months that followed, the United States punished the Native nations for their alliance with the Confederacy. The Five Civilized Tribes were forced to surrender much of their lands, grant a right-of-way through their territories to American RAILROAD companies, accept U. S. territorial governments within their lands, and, of course, abolish slavery.
After the Civil War, even those Native Americans who supported the Union found themselves punished. In the early years of RECONSTRUCTION, Indian nations of the West were the focus of attention of the U. S. Army. As more settlers moved west to make homestead claims or mining strikes, Native Americans were pushed farther and farther to the fringes of the U. S. territory. American hunters tapped into a new EASHION craze, the buffalo robe, and slaughtered the majority of the herds on the American plains, thus decimating a crucial Native resource. The battles and relocations subsequent to the Battle OE Little Bighorn in 1876 and the Nez Perce War of 1877 set the standard of postwar Indian settler and government relations.
Further reading: Anne Heloise Abel, The American Indian in the Civil War, 1862-1865 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); Ralph K. Andrist, The Long Death: The Last Days of the Plains Indian (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993); Laurence Hauptman, Between Two Fires: American Indians in the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1995).
—Andrew K. Frank
World History
