The paradox of freedom: tribal sovereignty and emancipation during the reconstruction of Indian territory.

IN 1937 NINETY-THREE-YEAR-OLD KIZIAH LOVE OF COLBERT, OKLAHOMA, told Jessie Ervin, a field-worker from the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration, about her years as a slave. "I can recollect things that happened way back better than I can things that happen now," said the blind and bedridden Love. With particular emotion she recalled her emancipation more than seventy years earlier. Ervin recorded her words in stylized English: "I was glad to be free. What did I do and Say? Well, I jest clapped my hands together and said, 'Thank God Almighty, I'se free at last!'" (1) Love resembled the four million other slaves in North America who celebrated the end of the Civil War, but her story differed from theirs in one fundamental way. She had been enslaved by Indians in the Choctaw Nation, and her emancipation came at the insistence of a foreign and colonial government, the United States.

Several scholars have skillfully chronicled the lives of bondpeople in Indian Territory, but the work has not yet been incorporated into the wider fields of Native American and Reconstruction history. (2) In accounts of Native American history, slavery and emancipation receive scant attention, and imprecise use of language by academics often obscures slaves held by Indians. (3) One historian, for example, fails to include the 18 percent of enslaved Chickasaws in his accounting of wartime refugees in that nation. Another writes that after the Civil War "[t]he Cherokees had lost almost everything but their land, and it was stripped of fences, horses and mills." Clearly these Cherokees do not include the 15 percent who gained their freedom. A third also overlooks the emancipation of slaves: "All the prosperity of the year 1861 had disappeared; the Cherokees were back virtually where they had been in 1839 when they were dispossessed, divided, and driven from their ancient homeland." (4)

These quotations imply that Chickasaw or Cherokee history treats Chickasaws or Cherokees but not their slaves, just as Reconstruction history once comprised only white southerners. Yet it cannot be denied that slaves made up a significant percentage of the population in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) and therefore must be included in accounts of the history of the Five Tribes (the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, Cherokees, and Seminoles). Inexact yet revealing population statistics illustrate the magnitude of the peculiar institution in the slave-holding nations of Indian Territory. At the outbreak of the Civil War a minimum of 10 percent of the Creek population was enslaved. Among the Choctaws at least 14 percent of the population was in bondage, and among the Cherokees the number may have surpassed 15 percent. On the far end of the spectrum, the Chickasaws enslaved fully 18 percent of their population. The Seminoles represent a special case. Although by one contemporary estimate nearly 30 percent of the population was enslaved, the line between slavery and kinship was less clear in this nation than in any other in Indian Territory. (5) In total, the enslaved population in the Five Tribes numbered perhaps as many as ten thousand. (6)

Like the literature on Native Americans, Reconstruction historiography has also largely overlooked the ex-slaves of the Five Tribes. Classic works by William A. Dunning, E. Merton Coulter, W. E. B. Du Bois, and John Hope Franklin do not discuss the fate of these freedpeople. Neither do more recent monographs. Eric Foner's prizewinning book on Reconstruction, summing up a generation of innovative work, mentions former slaves of Indians only parenthetically. (7) Even though the Civil War greatly affected the lives of Indians' slaves, accounts of the conflict in the West scarcely refer to them. (8)

This article will bring to bear on both Native American and Reconstruction historiography insights drawn from the history of ex-slaves in Indian Territory. The incorporation of ex-slaves into the study of Native Americans exposes a significant internal debate within native tribes about the meaning of freedom. Some native peoples understood freedom as the watchword of U.S. imperialism; their defense of tribal sovereignty converged with the vindication of slavery and its segregationist legacy. However, others embraced the idea of freedom and citizenship for blacks by drawing on indigenous traditions of incorporation and kinship to overcome any association of black freedom with U.S. imperialism. (9) In the context of Reconstruction historiography, the history of freedpeople in Indian Territory extends and deepens the recent literature on the meaning of freedom and on the legal ambiguities of emancipation and the amendments to the Constitution during Reconstruction. (10) As Reconstruction historiography has illustrated, the close of the war sparked a debate about whether freedom included civil equality, suffrage, the ownership of property, or all three. (11) Native Americans debated the same issues but faced one further question: Was freedom inherently part of the imperialist cant of a colonial power or could it be reinterpreted in their own language?

The postwar birth of freedom in Indian Territory can only be understood in the context of antebellum slavery. Historians frequently describe Indian slavery as a benign institution with little relationship to bondage elsewhere in the South, but more accurately the spectrum of servitude in Indian Territory ranged from kinship to chattel slavery. Most Indians, it is true, had little invested in slavery. In 1860, 88 percent of Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Creek families did not own slaves. (Similar statistics are unavailable for the Seminoles.) (12) Using racist language, contemporaries usually referred to nonslaveholding families as "full bloods." They assumed that Indian planters, by contrast, were "mixed bloods" whose partial white ancestry had led them to adopt white institutions such as chattel slavery. (13) Nineteenth-century white observers emphasized the contrasts in culture between these two groups. "[B]etween the wealthy half-breed with his slaves ... and the unclad Indian, there is a great disparity," a news report observed in the late 1830s. Planters, anxious to whiten themselves, shored up cracks in the racial boundaries with fictional genealogies and social posturing. Several leading Creek families, for example, had African ancestry, but they never acknowledged it in public. One Creek politician even cut off his kinky hair and wore a wig of "straight dark Indian hair," thereby attracting "the ill will of every colored man" in the nation "and plenty of Indians besides." (14)

Some so-called full bloods did own slaves, but according to Civil War soldiers who saw duty in Indian Territory, their bondpeople were slaves "only in name." "The full-blood Indian rarely works himself and but few of them make their slaves work," Ethan Allen Hitchcock noted. "A slave among wild Indians is almost as free as his owner, who scarcely exercises the authority of a master, beyond requiring something like a tax paid in corn or other product of labor." (15) Numerous observers and ex-slaves testified to the comparative kindness of these Indian masters. Resembling kin more than chattel, their slaves lived as family members, sometimes to the point of joining their owners in marriage. (16)

Kinship slaves were relatively fortunate; many others in Indian Territory had brutal masters. In 1937 Peggy McKinney Brown, reputedly 120 years old, recalled that her Choctaw former owner, Jesse McKinney, "was a very hard master. He had no regard for himself or any of the negro slave women, especially if they were of pleasant looks." Only after emancipation did Jesse reveal that he was Peggy's father. Indians whipped their slaves, even if sometimes only in "moderation," as one former bondman described the beatings. (17) One Indian slave owner laid fifty lashes on the back of a woman who dared to profess Christian beliefs. Another reportedly flogged his slave William Haynes when Haynes did not complete the daily task of picking five hundred pounds of cotton. "My father has said that he came through the slave days with much whipping and blood shed," Haynes's son recalled. Slave revolts and their violent suppression attest to the brutality of slavery in Indian Territory. When about two hundred Cherokee and Creek slaves took flight in 1842, both nations sent posses after them. Two Quaker missionaries reported, "Both Church and State seemed aroused on account of these desertions, and ready to make every possible effort to recover them at all hazards, and in future to enact more rigid laws for the government of their slaves, and for binding their chains more strongly upon them." (18)

A small number of powerful Indians and white men who married into the Five Tribes profited from this system. Two of the wealthiest Creek slave owners were reportedly each worth more than $50,000, a substantial sum at the time. One visitor in the late 1830s described a common sight in Indian Territory: the "wealthy half-breed with his slaves (who dresses in the latest fashion, and in the most expensive style, rides a fine horse and even sports an equipage for his family)." Recalling her childhood in Indian Territory, Alice Mary Robertson fondly remembered the liveried slaves who attended the coach of a Louisiana planter and his Cherokee wife. Robertson spent the night at the couple's plantation house in Indian Territory in a room appointed with a "great four-poster" bed and mahogany furniture. She recalled that the overseer of the plantation had a "sufficient number of slaves under his control to tend the farm, the orchard, to look after all the details of a comfortable planter's home." (19)

In some ways, Indian planters were as southern as their white counterparts who lived in the Indians' former homelands of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. In 1864 Creek Indian Abraham Foster willed his slaves and $1,300 in Confederate state bonds to his son, a testament of the father's southern identity. (During the war, some Native Americans had gone north to join the Union, while others, such as Foster, cast their lot with the Confederacy. Like white Americans, Indians had complex reasons for their wartime affiliations; slavery was only one of many motivating forces.) "Should my daughter Sally ever return to our (the Suthren Creek people)," Foster wrote of another offspring who had chosen Unionist ties, "it be the will and pleasure of my son Samuel Foster to give her the above named Sally any part of the property left to him by me." Foster's dedication to the southern cause is not surprising; he lived in Alabama until 1846, when he relocated with his thirty-nine slaves to Indian Territory. (20) Other Indians proved equally proud of their southern identity. One white Confederate officer in charge of troops in Indian Territory resigned because of the "growing disinclination" of Native Americans to serve under his command. By the officer's account, the insubordination arose from charges that he was "northern born and had no true feeling of sympathy with the south." (21)

More than anything else, the transition from slavery to freedom uncovered the deep roots that slavery had established in the Five Tribes. Perry McIntosh ran away from his Creek master in November 1862, heading north to join the Union Army. Captured near Maysville, Missouri, he was sent to Texas, where he worked as a slave until the close of the war. Soda Hawkins successfully made his escape, but his wife and children were seized by their Creek master, LaFayette Marshall, and carried south. (22) Phoebe Banks also remembered that some masters took their slaves "down into Texas so's they couldn't get away." According to Mary Grayson, after a number of bondmen fled, her Creek owner visited the slave cabins to threaten that "'We're going to take all you black devils to a place where there won't no more of you run away!'" (23)

At the close of the Civil War the birth of freedom for blacks in Indian Territory threatened some Native American residents and encouraged others. For planters the threats were several: emancipation created a serious labor problem, it jeopardized the integrity of the racial hierarchy, and it established overnight a large population with no clear civil or political status. For many Indian nonslaveholders, by contrast, freedom for former slaves offered hope. It appeared to undermine the hierarchy that subjugated dark-skinned peoples, and it promised to dislodge the Indian leaders who most resolutely adopted the economic and social practices of white Americans. For slaves, especially those working on large plantations producing cash crops, civil and political rights seemed the fitting culmination of emancipation. A final consideration cast a shadow over the hopes and fears of both Indians and their slaves. Freedom was largely undefined in the Five Tribes and, because of its association with U.S. imperialism, defining it would be especially troublesome.

The problem of freedom came to the fore in 1865 and 1866 when the United States negotiated a series of treaties that emancipated the slaves of Indians and provided for their incorporation into the Five Tribes. Acting in the name of natural rights, white reformers hoped to assimilate Indians into the American republic, and the emancipation of slaves was an important step in this direction. The Reconstruction government imposed civil and political rights for blacks on the Five Tribes as part of a larger project to assert the supremacy of the national state and to enlarge federal citizenship at the expense of relationships between slaves and masters, citizens and states, and Indians and indigenous governments. (24)

In September 1865 U.S. commissioners and representatives from the Five Tribes (as well as from other Indian nations) met at Fort Smith, Arkansas. Each of the Five Tribes sent contingents representing northern and southern factions that identified themselves by their wartime alliances with either the Union or the Confederacy. Divisions within the tribes ran deep and were defined by political disagreements from the era of removal and before. During the Civil War the disagreements erupted into violence (even if the Indians involved shared few of the ideological concerns of white Americans). Hundreds of Indians died at the hands of their neighbors, and hundreds more died of starvation and exposure after being driven out of their homes. (25) Now that peace had come, the factions were vying for control of their tribal governments.

On the other side, the U.S. commissioners hoped to reestablish relations between the Indian nations and the federal government, formally ending the Civil War in Indian Territory. The U.S. intended for each treaty to include the emancipation of slaves, the reconciliation of northern and southern tribal factions, the cession of land for the settlement of other Indians, and the creation of a territory-wide government. Both Native Americans and whites recognized that the consolidated territorial government would throw open Indian lands to exploitation. (26) It "will do great injustice," said one senator. But an army officer noted that without it "ten or twelve thousand" freedpeople would be without any government. (27) All of the treaty conditions ultimately anticipated a time when the Five Tribes would be folded into the United States.

In the proposed treaties, articles three and four addressed slavery. Article three stated that "[t]he institution of slavery which has existed among several of the tribes must be forthwith abolished, and measures taken for the unconditional emancipation of all persons held in bondage, and for their incorporation into the tribes on an equal footing with the original members, or suitably provided for." Article four held that "slavery, or involuntary servitude, shall never exist in the tribe or nation, except in punishment of crime." The words of article four mirrored the Thirteenth Amendment, which Congress had passed seven months earlier. Article three of the treaties, however, with its reference to equality, contained language rejected by the Senate committee responsible for drafting the Thirteenth Amendment. (28) Its half-hearted demand that ex-slaves be either adopted on an "equal footing" or "suitably provided for" reflects the general uncertainty in the United States about the precise meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment and freedom for ex-slaves. (29)

The ambiguity of article three of the treaties allowed tribal delegates to interpret it in a variety of ways. On one extreme, Union loyalists defined freedom broadly and welcomed it ungrudgingly. Northern Creeks avowed, "We are willing to provide for the abolishing of slavery and settlement of the blacks who were among us at the breaking out of the rebellion, as slaves or otherwise, as citizens entitled to all the rights and privileges that we are." Lewis Johnson, on behalf of the few hundred Union Chickasaws, expressed similar sentiments. "I have heard much said about the black folks," he said. "They suffered as much as we did. I have always understood that the President esteemed the colored people, and we are willing to do just as our Father may wish, and take them in and assist them, and let them help us. So I think and feel towards them." (30)

In defining freedom, these delegates drew both on indigenous traditions that had long provided for the incorporation of slaves into their communities and on American abolitionism. Like most societies organized around kinship, Southeastern Indians used adoption and marriage to turn strangers into relatives. Lewis Johnson's offer to take in ex-slaves, "assist them," and "let them help us" suggests the kind of reciprocity based on mutual obligations that typically characterizes relations between family members in kin-based societies. (31) One Creek delegate also expressed the sense of family that existed between Indians and freed slaves. "Now the loyal people are friends to the Freedmen," he said; "they have been as brothers, and they wish this friendship to continue and that all rights may be [same?]." (32) Yet Southeastern Indians could not define postwar freedom solely by indigenous traditions because the sudden emancipation of thousands of people was unprecedented among the Five Tribes. Moreover, the growing reliance on written legal codes forced Indians to spell out with unprecedented specificity the rights and privileges of their newly adopted citizens. Therefore, Indian delegates also turned to American intellectual traditions to define freedom, as illustrated by the Creeks' reference to citizenship and rights.

Not all Indians were so accepting of treaty articles three and four. Union Choctaws and Cherokees agreed to them without comment, but their silence on the matter may have signaled hostility rather than acceptance. In 1863 the Union Cherokees had emancipated their slaves but denied them rights as citizens, hoping to expel them from the nation as intruders. Seminoles who backed the Union were more equivocal, agreeing to admit their ex-slaves "upon some plan to be agreed upon by us and approved by the government." Confederate partisans were also evasive. Southern Chickasaws and Choctaws (nearly the entire nonblack populations of both tribes) agreed to the preliminary treaty in 1865 with the understanding that the status of slavery was "open to further negotiation." (33) The former Confederate Seminoles similarly tried to avoid making a firm commitment to article three. After initially agreeing to all proposed articles, they later rescinded their approval of both three and six, claiming that they were "ignorant" of the articles' "requirements" and "would like these questions [to] stand open for some future consideration." (Article six provided for the creation of a single territorial government in Indian Territory.) (34)

The central concern of these delegates stemmed from article three's reference to equality. The southern Cherokees explained that they "accepted the abolition of slavery as a fact accomplished" but asserted that it "would neither be for the benefit of the emancipated negro nor for the Indian to 'incorporate' the former into the several tribes 'on an equal footing with the original members.'" Although conceding that freed slaves should be "suitably provided for," they insisted that "so serious and delicate a question should not be so hastily considered and acted upon." Southern Creeks Daniel N. McIntosh and James M. C. Smith more explicitly asserted that legal equality for ex-slaves was "contrary to nature and nature's laws." "We can never recognize them as our equals," they wrote. (35)

Like those who embraced political freedom for freedpeople, Indian delegates who opposed black citizenship drew on both indigenous and foreign traditions. Even though many planters fathered children by their bondwomen, as Peggy McKinney Brown and other ex-slaves later testified, some Indians maintained the fiction that their slaves were not kin and therefore, by the customs of the Five Tribes, not members of the community. (Today, the same logic is used to justify the disenfranchisement of the descendants of the slaves of the Five Tribes.) Other Indians drew on the new American science of racism to explain why their ex-slaves should be given only limited freedom. (36) Cherokee delegates had hinted at the logic of scientific racism by denying that equal rights would benefit freedpeople. Former Confederate Seminoles also insisted that equality would injure the welfare of both Indians and ex-slaves, adding that the proposition to incorporate freedpeople on an equal footing "shocks the lesson we have learned for long years from the white man as to the negro's inferiority." Creek delegates McIntosh and Smith bolstered their objection by referring to Jeremiah 13:23, a favorite passage of nineteenth-century scientific racists: "The antipathies of race among Indians areas strong, if not stronger than they are among the whites. The Government of the United States ... may force us to things repugnant to our nature; but it cannot change our honest conviction and faith, any more than it can change the skin of the Ethiopian, or the spots of the Leopard." (37)

The hostility to ex-slaves also emanated from the need of planters to find another pool of workers. (38) By beating ex-slaves into submission, the campaign of violence that spread across the South after the Civil War offered one solution. Indian planters pursued this strategy with some success. "About all the attempts at agriculture made since the war have been made by the freedmen," wrote an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau in 1870, but "Most of the fruits of their labor have been enjoyed without reward by rebel Indians, and mean whites." Indian planters faced the additional difficulty of dispossessing and subjugating laborers in nations where land was communal and abundant. By their own laws, they could only deny land to noncitizens, making the emancipation and naturalization of emancipated slaves a serious threat to the economic and social order. Eventually Chickasaw and Cherokee planters would turn to poor white laborers "by the thousand," noncitizens with no claims to land, but in 1865 the solution to the labor problem remained unclear. (39)

Indian delegates had one further reason for circumscribing the freedom of ex-slaves. They wished to protect the sovereign rights of their nations. This concern is evident in the Seminoles' and Cherokees' rejection of article six along with article three. They recognized that in tandem these acts--the creation of a territorial government and the vesting of ex-slaves in tribal lands--were part of ad implicit plan by the federal government to dismantle Indian sovereignty. If the Five Tribes defined citizenship universally and governed within a federal administrative unit modeled on the state, it would be only a small step to the complete dissolution of their nations. Southern Chickasaws and Choctaws perceived the danger. Their delegates stated that "we do not consent to, nor do we understand the United States as meaning to assume, the control or jurisdiction over our internal national affairs, or claiming jurisdiction or control over our local affairs or national organization." Daniel N. McIntosh and James M. C. Smith also voiced concern. The "laws of the Creek nation" have "jurisdiction" in regard to "suffrage and political equality" for ex-slaves, they insisted. Although they were not opposed to the organization of Indian Territory into a single political entity, they pointedly declared that they were against extending congressional jurisdiction over the area. (40)

Northern Indians who embraced rights for freedpeople were of course equally interested in defending tribal sovereignty, but they found strength in defining freedom expansively rather than narrowly. Southern delegates, by contrast, staked tribal sovereignty on the ability of Indians to deny their former slaves the full benefits of freedom. Faced with a divided opposition, U.S. commissioners in September 1865 requested that delegates sign only a modest treaty that recognized the "exclusive jurisdiction" of the United States over the Indians and looked forward to future agreements settling all outstanding issues. (41)

The negotiations at Fort Smith left slaves of Indians between bondage and freedom, both legally and in practice. Though some U.S. officials believed otherwise, the treaty commissioners had called merely for measures to be taken to emancipate enslaved peoples. "I have not learned that any 'measures' in relation to this matter have made emancipation in the Indian Country an accomplished fact," concluded one agent from the Freedmen's Bureau in December 1865. Similar confusion surrounded the reach of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. The Emancipation Proclamation did not mention any of the western territories in its list of subject areas. In September 1863 the northern Creeks had agreed to "cheerfully accept and ratify" the proclamation for their own nation. But few people anywhere were aware of this Creek resolution, and in any case the authority of these Indians to legislate for the entire tribe was in question. (Northern Cherokees also emancipated their slaves in 1863.) A better case might have been made for the applicability of the Thirteenth Amendment. (42) Yet confusion reigned even in the federal courts, where one judge asserted that both the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment applied to Indian Territory. (43) Later a higher court rejected his finding. (44) The last constitutional governments in North America to proscribe slavery therefore belonged to the Choctaws and Chickasaws.

In 1866 a second series of treaties would clarify the legal status of slaves, but in the meantime, residents of the Five Tribes fought over the matter. "I ask in behalf of the loyal Africans from Creek Nation that they have guaranteed to them equal rights with the Indian," freedman Monday Durant had written to the commissioner of Indian affairs in 1864. After the war the Indian response to such demands ranged from active support to begrudging acceptance to violent hostility. According to John B. Sanborn, a federal officer charged with reporting on the status of freedpeople among the Five Tribes, ex-slaves of Creeks and Seminoles believed that they could live under the protection of tribal laws. Among the Cherokees, though, Sanborn found that "not a very small portion" of citizens held that the United States should remove the ex-slaves, "as it has freed them"--a belief shared by other southerners in the Confederate states. But the ruling faction of the Cherokees reached a compromise; they hoped to settle their freed slaves on a separate tract of Cherokee land and to accord them civil rights. (45)

Among Choctaws and Chickasaws, where Indians loyal to the Union were thoroughly outnumbered by their southern counterparts, Indians absolutely opposed the extension of civil and political rights to former slaves. With the most extensive plantations in Indian Territory, members of the two nations frequently refused to recognize even emancipation. By October 1865 there were reports in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations of "a most deadly persecution upon the colored people," part of a larger campaign of violence against freedpeople in the South. According to an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau, some Choctaws and Chickasaws were beating their former slaves to death. (46) Shortly after the conference at Fort Smith, Chickasaw governor Winchester Colbert implemented a plan of gradual emancipation: "To apprentice all free negroes under twenty-one years until of age, to their former owners, provide for the aged over fifty, infirm, and employ the middle-aged at fair wages." But by January 1866 most slaves were still in bondage, according to Sanborn. (47)

Even if Colbert's plan had provided them with a modicum of freedom, it still left at least half of the Chickasaw ex-slaves without any formal status because the policy excluded all freedpeople who were not resident in the nation when the Fort Smith treaty was signed. At the time many were returning from Texas, where their masters had driven them during the war; others, especially refugee women and children, were on the road from Kansas; and still others had yet to be discharged from the Union army. Colbert ultimately wished to delay complete emancipation until the United States offered compensation to Chickasaw masters for their slaves. (Many southern planters had similar expectations.) (48) If compensation were not forthcoming, Sanborn learned, "they would strip them naked and drive them either south to Texas, or north to Fort Gibson." Furthermore, "Many negroes have been shot down by their masters in this nation," Sanborn observed, "and the government has taken no steps to punish the guilty." (49) A group of Chickasaw freedmen confirmed that their former masters were consumed by "hatred and vindictiveness" for them. (50)

Matters were no better among the Choctaws. Relations between masters and ex-slaves were "much the same" as before emancipation, wrote Sanborn. Ironically, only ex-slaves driven away from their former homes by their masters had any taste of freedom. Ex-slaves who had secured their freedom in flight petitioned army officers at Fort Smith for military escorts to visit their families still held in bondage. (51) Choctaw slave owner Michael Laflore kidnapped four of his former bondmen in Arkansas and bound and beat them during the abduction to his plantation. In late September 1865 Laflore was reportedly still buying "colored people" in the Choctaw Nation, paying $100 in gold. Sanborn concluded that "the public sentiment of this nation in regard to the freedmen is radically wrong at the present time." (52) An agent of the Freedmen's Bureau suggested that the United States "impress those tribes with the conviction that the Govt. of the U.S. is resolved to respect and protect the rights of the Negroes." Sanborn was bolder. He argued that U.S. martial law should be imposed on the Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Cherokee Nations "in full force, and fully enforced." (53)

The violence against freedpeople led to a paradoxical association of interests, an unexpected result of the strategy of southern Indians. The United States, as Sanborn's reference to martial law illustrated, sided with the cause of both freedom and imperialism, Indian leaders with subordination and self-determination. Emancipation in fact would later lead both white and black Americans to champion the cause of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean and elsewhere on the grounds that colonization, in the words of one contemporary, "would enable our neighbors to join with us in the blessings of our free institutions." (54) In Indian Territory the ironic convergence between freedom and imperialism and between subordination and self-determination is highlighted by the new round of treaties that the United States settled with the Five Tribes in 1866. Each 1866 treaty had four principal points: the reconciliation of northern and southern tribal factions, the emancipation and incorporation of slaves into Indian nations, the compensation of Union Indians for property losses, and the cession of lands to be used for the settlement of other native peoples. (55)

The enormous land cessions contributed to the fulfillment of U.S. visions of Manifest Destiny. Although U.S. imperialism overseas did not begin until the end of the nineteenth century, during the Civil War the federal government significantly expanded its reach over the West in a comparable way, using idle troops and even Confederate prisoners to push Native Americans onto reservations. After the war American expansionists looked on Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean as possible areas to annex, and closer to home they eyed Indian Territory. (56) Pressured by U.S. government officials, in their 1866 treaty the Seminoles turned over their entire domain, over two million acres, in exchange for lands in the Creek Nation. The Creeks themselves ceded over three million acres with only modest compensation. (57) These cessions began the road to allotment in severalty, dispossession, and impoverishment, all in the name of natural rights. The ironies are clear enough, but the ambiguous meaning of rights is most evident in a final stipulation of the 1866 treaties. Each of the Five Tribes conceded permission, termed rights-of-way, to railroads to lay tracks through their land. These particular rights sparked a destructive chain of events: economic development, an invasion of white colonists, and public pressure to dismantle the Five Tribes.

With varying force the 1866 treaties also mandated civil and political equality for ex-slaves, principles that again divided Indian leaders. Only the Seminoles agreed to adopt their former slaves without protest, perhaps more a result of their dire situation and weak bargaining position than any conviction on the part of their leaders. (58) Negotiations with the other nations were more difficult. Northern Creeks actively lobbied for the incorporation of ex-slaves, but their southern counterparts vehemently objected. Adopting the paternalist rhetoric of southern planters, southern Creeks insisted that their "ancient care and kindness" would guarantee the well-being of ex-slaves and that political and social equality was unnecessary and even wrong. (59) "We cannot but think you are disposed to require more for the freedman, than is just, or reasonable," southern Creeks wrote to the commissioner of Indian affairs, "more than the whites have done or propose to do anywhere." They specifically objected to granting freedpeople an equal interest in either annuities or land but promised them all of the "rights, privileges, and immunities of our own citizens," along with the right to "occupy" forty or eighty acres. Their offer followed by one month the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which granted civil rights to American ex-slaves--including the right to own property, the right of contract, and the right to testify in court--but not the economic rights that land redistribution would have accorded. (60) Indians were in fact being asked to do more for freedpeople than were white Americans. When the U.S. government proceeded to push for the treaty, however, the former Confederate Creeks withdrew their objections and signed the agreement (perhaps encouraged by a payment of $15,000 "for extraordinary expenses incurred by them"). (61)

Among the Cherokees the breach between southern and northern parties appeared irreparable, and the United States, anticipating a permanent division, planned on settling a separate treaty with each faction. It opened negotiations with the southern Cherokees, who reluctantly agreed to adopt their ex-slaves with the expectation that the freedpeople would eventually be removed from the nation. The northern faction absolutely objected to any formal division of the nation, and when the United States threatened to ratify the treaty with the southern Cherokees, the northern Cherokees were forced to concede to all American demands. The terms included the granting of citizenship to Cherokee freedpeople, a move that John Ross, the principal chief, personally opposed. (62)

The Choctaws and Chickasaws, with roots in antebellum Mississippi, were particularly adamant about refusing to adopt their ex-slaves, and their treaty included a complicated provision that permitted the eventual exclusion of freedpeople from the nations. By the terms of the treaty, the U.S. government would hold in trust $300,000, profits realized from a forced land sale, until the ex-slaves were incorporated as citizens. If after two years the Choctaws and Chickasaws had not adopted their ex-slaves, the United States would use the money for the benefit of freedpeople who relocated within ninety days. Those who remained would be accorded the same status as other U.S. citizens residing in the nations. That is, they would be outsiders subject to special taxes and unable to hold land. (63) The indeterminate status of Choctaw and Chickasaw ex-slaves would trouble them for years to come and would aggravate relations between the United States and these Indian nations well into the twentieth century.

As in the United States, the meaning of freedom remained unsettled and caught between opposing forces that included the U.S. government, tribal governments, former masters, and ex-slaves. On one side stood the federal government, newly empowered by the Reconstruction amendments and civil rights legislation to protect the rights of U.S. citizens. The 1866 treaties extended its jurisdiction over ex-slaves residing in Indian Territory. Faced with these treaties, many Native Americans defined freedom broadly to embrace both indigenous traditions of kinship and adoption and foreign traditions of individual rights. This meaning of freedom gained the most currency among the Seminoles and Creeks, partly because marriage between people of Indian and African descent was more common in these nations, making kinship a fact difficult to deny. As early as 1842 one army officer reportedly had predicted "that in a few years the Creeks would be all black" because of the rate of intermarriage. One observer noted that by 1870 the Creeks were "largely amalgamated with the African." The Seminoles, after fighting three wars with the help of their slaves, intermarried even more frequently. (64)

Oktarsars Harjo, the leader of the northern Creeks, vigorously expressed this broad definition of freedom. He declared that according to the treaty of 1866 "[t]he Colored-people residing among the Creeks under their laws and usages were entitled to all the rights and privileges of full-blood Indians of the Nation." "With them as with other Creeks," he asserted, "no distinctions were to be based save those on the score of loyalty or disloyalty to the U.S. Government as exhibited during the war for the Union, 1861-5." (65) In contrast to former Confederate Indians, Oktarsars Harjo upheld the treaty of 1866 and its mandate of equal rights as a point of pride and a marker of nationalism. "I believe that there are some Creeks who do not believe that our treaty was a good one," he stated, "but we believe that it is the one that we are bound to uphold and we intend to abide by all its stipulations." Members of the opposing party "were officers in the Rebel Army." Remarkably, Oktarsars Harjo equated the treaty of 1866 with "the old Indian law." "According to the treaty," he explained, "we were all one Nation, and would share the money equally, colored people and Indians." (66)

Other Indian leaders failed to reconcile black freedom and tribal sovereignty, however. In 1870 S. N. Clark, a special agent of the Freedmen's Bureau, expressed misgivings about the Choctaws and Chickasaws: "That the rebel Indians of those tribes would recognize the freedmen as citizens was as probable as that the white rebels of Georgia or South Carolina would voluntarily recognize the freedmen of those states as citizens." "The violations of the Civil Rights law," he noted, "have been so flagrant as to call the attention of the U.S. District Judge." (67) The problem was twofold. First, many Indians--like their counterparts in the Confederate states--wanted to maintain the racial hierarchy of the antebellum era. Second, the Five Tribes were not states, nor were they subject to the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Any coercive action on the part of the federal government to extend freedom in Indian Territory was imperialist. Clark's observations suggest how laws assuring ex-slaves' freedom, protected and defended by the federal government, could be deleterious to tribal sovereignty.

In public statements Indian politicians revealed their resentment toward U.S. intrusions. The Chickasaw governor explained in 1885 that "the Chickasaw people can not see any reason or just cause why they should be required to do more for their freed slaves than the white people have done in the slaveholding States for theirs." He argued that "it was by the example and teaching of the white man that we purchased, at enormous prices, their slaves and used their labor, and were forced by the result of their war to liberate our slaves at a great loss and sacrifice on our part, and we do not hold or consider our nation responsible in nowise for their present situation." (68)

Other politicians also insisted that emancipation and freedom for blacks were merely the despised instruments of U.S. imperialism. William Wilson, a member of the Cherokee National Council, revealed his thoughts in a tense exchange with a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1885. He asserted that the treaty of 1866 "was dictated to us after the war, and we accepted it. We submitted to it all right." A senator pressed the question:

   Q. You don't want to drive those out who were made free by that
   treaty, do you?--A. Yes, sir; I want them all to go....
   Q. You don't believe in the theory that all men are equal?--A. No,
   sir; I do not.
   Q. You think a Cherokee Indian is better than a colored man?--A.
   You tried to get that out of me a little while ago. (69)

To the misfortune of ex-slaves, all of the governments of the Five Tribes were dominated in the years following the Civil War by Indian politicians who found tribal sovereignty and black freedom to be nearly incompatible. Freedom was most circumscribed in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. By 1870 most Choctaw and Chickasaw freedpeople should have been incorporated or relocated according to the terms of the 1866 treaties, but these former slaves remained in the nations with no recognized rights and no prospect for securing them. Rather than adopt their ex-slaves, the Choctaws and Chickasaws tried to expel them once and for all from their nations. The Chickasaw government was particularly active in this regard. In 1866 and 1868 the legislature passed resolutions calling on the United States to remove all ex-slaves. A proclamation by the Chickasaw governor in 1870 required all freedpeople to purchase permits to remain in the nation. In January 1873 the legislature proposed a halfhearted scheme for adoption, subject to congressional approval, but ten months later it sent a delegation to the Choctaws to "agree upon some plan whereby the freedmen, former slaves of the Choctaws and Chickasaws, and their descendants, shall be removed from and kept out of the limits of the Choctaw and Chickasaw country." (70)

When legislation failed, some Choctaws and Chickasaws simply drove their ex-slaves away. "They are jealous of any acquirement of property we may make," wrote a number of freedmen in 1874, "and if we improve land or make a home, they assert some old claim upon that land, and thereby we are ordered off and have to start a new home." By 1880 the Choctaws were classifying their former slaves as "intruders" and taking their land. "We want you to tell the Government all about what thy are trying to [do] with Colord people," one Choctaw freedman wrote to a local A.M.E. minister in 1880. (71) John Wilson, also a Choctaw freedman, recounted his story to the commissioner of Indian affairs that same year. In the early 1870s Wilson had purchased a homestead in the nation, but recently a Choctaw had settled nearby, fenced off part of Wilson's property, and threatened to evict him altogether. "He claims that I have no right and that he can take my place with-out paying for it," Wilson wrote. Freedman Charles Anderson explained in 1881 that the Choctaws "say now that we are their property; that we are nothing more than a horse or a cow; that we were unjustly taken from them. And therefore have no right to have equal rights with them." (72)

The Chickasaws never adopted their former slaves, but in 1883, under pressure from the United States and anxious to secure their share of the $300,000, the Choctaws did so. Afterward, ex-slaves sent scores of letters to the secretary of the interior protesting the terms of their adoption. Ironically the fears of Indian politicians were self-confirming: by circumscribing blacks' freedom, they had encouraged ex-slaves to call for the protection of the United States, thereby jeopardizing tribal sovereignty. (73) Choctaw freedpeople complained that they had no right to the vast public domain except for a mere forty acres each, no right to tribal annuities, no eligibility for high public offices, no schools beyond "little Destrick schools," and no ability to extend their citizenship to their spouses. This last grievance had troubling implications. At the death of a freedman who had married outside the tribe, his property would revert to the Choctaw Nation, for the widow would be expelled as an intruder. In 1885 freedmen from Brazil (southwest of Fort Smith) concluded their objections with a dramatic description of "blackjack government," referring to the species of oak tree commonly used as a whipping post in the nation:

   the [Choctaws] all say the [freedmen] shant have any Rite in the
   Nation What so Ever and The dont want ous to call on the portections
   of the you nited states for no help so help me Good [sic] only to
   look up to the Black jack government fore we have to look that way
   or Be tied tone [sic] and Receive from one 100 to 500 lashes you
   Know that dont feel very wel to a man after a hard Days laber. (74)

The dire situation led a number of freedmen to call directly for U.S. intervention. J. J. Briarley took his cause all the way to Grover Cleveland. After recounting how two Choctaw policemen casually shot down his friend Lemon Triams in 1886, Briarley pleaded, "Dont turn us loose Keep us in your Charge Mr Cleavland." Toney Henderson protested about the lack of schooling, blacks' exclusion from the electoral process, and an 1885 law that made blacks who married Choctaws subject to fifty lashes "on their bair back." He asked the secretary of the interior, "United States when turned the Darkey loose she mad them Equal sitizens with them An is the Choctaw any better than the United States?" George W. Shields charged that "this Nation haven not gave the freedon [freedmen] no Rights here." He made his desires clear: "Please to Take us back Under New United States." (75) Granted freedom that barely encompassed emancipation from direct bondage, ex-slaves in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations made concerted efforts to attract the imperialist protection of the federal government.

In the Cherokee Nation, by contrast, Indians defined freedom more broadly. According to the terms of their 1866 treaty, freedpeople were immediately adopted by the nation and granted full and equal civil rights. But to qualify for adoption, former slaves had to return within six months of the agreement, and Cherokees took advantage of this clause to limit the rights of their nation's freedpeople. As freedman Reuben Sanders explained in 1874, many ex-slaves could not meet the requirements of the treaty: "[M]any of us Ran to the union army for protection.... and Some were taken as far South as texas by there owners and we were intily destitude Some Nevere had So much as a Horse or wagon infact we had nothing but what we had on our Back." Traveling hundreds of miles by foot through war-torn countryside, these migrants sometimes received a hostile reception on their arrival back home. In the fall of 1866 Cherokees attacked forty or fifty ex-slaves who were returning to the nation. U.S. troops marched from Van Buren, Arkansas, to put an end to the violence. (76) Ex-slaves "found themselves intruders and violaters [sic] of the law if they dared to stop in the only home they ever had and where they were born and raised," wrote one Indian agent. "Many of them speak the Cherokee language and having been raised among the Cherokees and accustomed to their ways," he explained. "[T]hey would starve if removed from the Cherokee Country." (77)

Some Cherokee politicians had little sympathy for their former slaves who were unable to obtain citizenship. Reuben Sanders reported that the "majority of the Senate and officers have been officers of the Rebel army" and that they "Say they intend to work Aganst Negroes till Hell freeses over." In 1880 the Cherokee Assembly debated the adoption of ex-slaves who had not returned by the stipulated deadline, but political pressures thwarted positive action. "It is unpopular in the Cherokee Nation to advocate a measure that provides for placing the colored man on an equality with Cherokees," explained one Indian agent. (78)

The terms of adoption in the 1866 treaty allowed Cherokees a convenient reason to deny rights to their ex-slaves. During the distribution of an annuity payment in 1875, for instance, the Cherokee treasurer Dennis Bushyhead refused payment to a number of freedpeople. (79) Even more troubling were the summary evictions of ex-slaves from their farms. In 1885 the Reverend Thomas Mayfield, a freedman, testified that Cherokee sheriffs had evicted him from his land on the charge that he had returned to the nation too late to receive citizenship. (80) Deportation frequently separated families, leaving women with out husbands and children without fathers. John McDonald, a "delaware blooded colored man," elaborated on the obstacles faced by freedpeople. He moved to the Cherokee Nation in 1867 with other Delaware Indians adopted into the tribe. He soon discovered that his skin color was a greater liability than his Delaware ancestry. In the early 1880s he was evicted from his farm by Ellen Mathes, a light-skinned Cherokee. "Just Because I am mixed with Colored the[y] say No Negro shall have any Rite in this Nation," he wrote. McDonald perceived the irony of the situation. Light-skinned Cherokees who were as little as "one 16 part of indian Blood" were welcomed into the nation. By contrast, "hundreds of corlored people in this Nation just lookes like a fool Blood But because the are mixted with corlored the[y] dont want them in the Na[tion]." The situation was grim, he warned. The Cherokees were "maken the Brages that they will have all of the negros farms." McDonald suggested not only that Cherokees were hostile to freedpeople but that their enmity extended to all people of African descent. (81)

Well into the twentieth century, Cherokees resisted the adoption of their "useless and degraded Negroes," as the 1897 National Council described the nation's former slaves. The dispossession of ex-slaves became more pressing in the 1890s when the United States began to allot communally held Cherokee lands to individuals, conferring title in fee simple. Some Cherokees considered repealing the 1866 treaty altogether, a strategy inspired by the Supreme Court's 1886 ruling that gave the U.S. Congress the power to disregard its treaties with Indian nations. (82) "It is high time," wrote one Cherokee, "that we were finding out, if there cannot be some trade by which we can get the 'negro' out of the country." But no such trade ever occurred. (83)

One Cherokee leader pointed out the fundamental dilemma faced by ex-slaves and urged them to acquiesce to the rulings of the Cherokee government. Has the United States given land to its ex-slaves? he asked. "Go and ask those shrinking philanthropists and bring back the answer. Listen to the advise [sic] of your friends, don't treat us as though you had gained your homes by conquest or held your rights by force of arras, and if you would be respected always be respectful." (84) His patronizing advice scarcely accorded with the aspirations of freedpeople, yet he touched on one important truth. Freedom in the Cherokee Nation, even if compromised, was more generous than freedom in the redeemed southern states.

Just west of the Cherokee Nation, freedpeople in the Creek Nation were waging their own struggle for equal rights. According to the treaty of 1866, the laws of the Creek Nation "shall be equally binding upon and give equal protection to all such persons, and all others, of whatsoever race or color, who may be adopted as citizens or members of said tribe." In collusion with officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, some Creeks began violating the terms of this article almost immediately. In 1867 the Creek Nation received a per-capita payment from the United States in remuneration for their losses during the late war. Samuel Checote, the principal chief and a Confederate veteran, convinced the commissioner of Indian affairs to exclude freed slaves from the payment. (85) But northern Creeks and ex-slaves insisted that all citizens should be equal. Oktarsars Harjo, the former principal chief, voiced his complaints in more detail in a letter describing a meeting of the National Council, the Creek Nation's legislative body: "I was at the Council urging the rights of the loyal people and endeavoring to get their money for them to pay certain debts. And then when I think of the manner in which their rights were there denied and how the Freedmen were refused their per capita (payments) in the two hundred thousand Dollars paid in March last, I see the intention of the Southern Creeks to be to trample the northern people under their feet denying them same rights in every particular." (86)

Despite the Creek movement to grant freedom to ex-slaves, former slaves would find their rights challenged by southern Indians in the coming years. In 1896 W. A. Sapulpa, son of a former Confederate officer, led a group of Creek representatives to meet the Dawes Commission, which was trying to reach a final agreement on the allotment in severalty of Creek lands. (87) Sapulpa's delegation asked the government officials several revealing questions:

   Who do you mean by the term "citizen"? Are adopted citizens by the
   Treaty of 1866 to be included in this class?

   Would you consent for the tribe to allot the lands as the members
   thereof may desire?

   Would you agree to place the adopted Freedmen of our Nation upon
   the same terms with the Freedmen of the Choctaw Nation with
   reference to allotment of land?

The Dawes commissioners responded succinctly that citizens adopted in 1866 had the same rights as other Creek citizens, each citizen must be given an equal share of land, and the rights of freedpeople under the treaty of 1866 could not be curtailed. (88)

Sapulpa and other southern Indians in the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee tribes conflated nationalism and racism by believing that the integrity of their sovereignty rested on racial hierarchy. In their view freedom for blacks represented an unalloyed threat to their nations' autonomy. One Presbyterian missionary perceived the problem in 1872. Southern Creeks (largely of white ancestry, he said) "were educated in whiping and driveing [sic] slaves and still want to be masters and rulers." They equated Indian sovereignty with their own authority as masters, and their authority as masters depended on race slavery. The missionary recognized the parallel to states' rights. At one boarding school controlled by Creeks once allied with the Confederacy he observed that "[n]ational rights, power and greatness is the patriotism that is taught. Not 'State rights' but 'national rights.'" (89)

Only in the Seminole Nation did ex-slaves enjoy "unconditional citizenship," as one Indian agent optimistically described it. Seminole politicians, like officeholders elsewhere in Indian Territory, were southern sympathizers, but they were unable to legislate or enforce their agenda. (90) Their powerlessness reflected not only the strength of indigenous traditions of kinship and incorporation in the Seminole Nation but also the prevalence of kinship between Indians and ex-slaves. The commissioner of Indian affairs claimed that equality "was the more easily accomplished in the case of the Seminoles, since there had already been a considerable intermingling of the races before the tribe removed from Florida." In the other nations, kinship also remained a countervailing force structuring relations between some Indians and their former slaves, but this fact received scant acknowledgment from the politicians who dominated tribal governments. Surviving sources document views of politicians rather than those of others who rarely spoke English and even less often knew how to write. It was left to common Indians such as James L. Grayson to argue for a more inclusive indigenous definition of freedom. "I am an Indian by blood," he wrote to the secretary of the interior in 1899, "But like to see our poor colored people have their rights." (91) Grayson may have been identified on the Creek rolls as an "Indian by blood," but he knew well that many of his kin were ex-slaves. (92)

Only by adopting arbitrary categories of exclusion--categories defined by race, kinship, or citizenship, for example--can historians dismiss slaves and ex-slaves from accounts of the Native American past. Their presence in the Five Tribes necessarily makes them a part of Indian history. On numerous occasions and in various ways, freedpeople attested to their deep roots in Indian Territory. In an 1864 letter to the commissioner of Indian affairs, Monday Durant ended his appeal for "equal rights with the Indian" with a succinct postscript underneath his name: "Sixty years in the Creek Nation." Choctaw freedman Charles Anderson was more explicit in a letter to the commissioner in 1881. "This is our home," he said. "We have made the country what is made of it." Toney Henderson echoed Anderson's sentiments in 1888: "We are the Persons who are Bread and born Rite here in the [Choctaw Nation]." (93) One Cherokee freedman even took his case directly to former slave owners in his nation. "You talk about adoption," he wrote to a local newspaper in 1891. "[W]e are not of that class of people; we never came here from Kansas, Missouri, or Texas, to be adopted into this nation. We were born here; this is our birthplace and I think it would be a hard matter for the Cherokees to adopt one of their own family." (94)

At the core of the problematic relationship between ex-slaves and native peoples was the paradoxical nature of freedom in Indian Territory. The ideology of freedom was at once emancipatory and oppressive. It both justified the end of slavery and precipitated the dissolution of the Five Tribes. In the name of freedom, the federal government fought to abolish tribal sovereignty, distribute Indian lands in severalty, and absorb Indians into the American republic. (95) Freedom was not merely a smokescreen for territorial expansion, however, for the same faith in natural rights underlay both the government's aggressive imperialism in Indian country and its new commitment to civil equality as manifested in the Reconstruction amendments. In 1870 the renowned abolitionist Wendell Phillips unwittingly exposed this connection. The Fifteenth Amendment was indeed a great victory, he stated. Yet its "truth, that all men are created equal," demanded further action because the amendment applied only to blacks and whites. "With infinite toil, at vast expense, sealing the charter with 500,000 graves, we have made it true of the negro," he stated. "With what toil, at what cost, with what devotion, you will make it true of the Indian and the Chinese, the coming years will tell." (96) Some Radical Republicans had already suggested extending the Fourteenth Amendment to cover American Indians as well as African Americans. (97) Yet U.S. citizenship was a gift that native peoples, already citizens of their own nations, neither wanted nor needed.

The story of ex-slaves and native peoples in Indian Territory complicates both Native American and Reconstruction historiography. In Native American history the focus has been on the always-contested expansion of U.S. imperialista in the postwar years. The dilemmas of freedom--the struggle of indigenous peoples and their ex-slaves to negotiate the meaning of freedom and its relationship to tribal sovereignty--are largely unexamined. These themes are critically important to understanding the late nineteenth century. In Reconstruction history, scholars have explored in great depth the meaning of freedom in the context of civil rights, suffrage, and the ownership of property and have illustrated that freedom was fraught with ambiguity. The case of the Five Tribes suggests that freedom was at its most problematic in Indian Territory, where so-called natural rights had to be imposed by a colonial power. (98) Although native peoples debated the meaning of freedom, in the end their leaders adopted a language that resembled the rhetoric of states' rights. Their decision still reverberates today. In both tribal and federal courts the Five Tribes are confronting the descendants of their slaves in lawsuits over citizenship. (99) Freedom and tribal sovereignty remain unreconciled.

(1) T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker, eds., The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives (Norman, Okla., 1996), 257 (first quotation), 262 (second quotation).

(2) For example see Daniel F. Littlefield Jr., Africans and Seminoles: From Removal to Emancipation (Westport, Conn., 1977); Littlefield, The Cherokee Freedmen: From Emancipation to American Citizenship (Westport, Conn., 1978); Africans and Creeks: From the Colonial Period to the Civil War (Westport, Conn., 1979); Littlefield, The Chickasaw Freedmen: A People Without a Country (Westport, Conn., 1980); Katja May, African Americans and Native Americans in the Creek and Cherokee Nations, 1830s to 1920s: Collision and Collusion (New York, 1996); Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (Lubbock, Tex., 1993); Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (Knoxville, 1979); and Kenneth W. Porter, The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People (Gainesville, Fla., 1996).

(3) Historians have generally dismissed the history of the slavery and emancipation of blacks in the Indian nations. See Angie Debo, The Road to Disappearance (Norman, Okla., 1941), 142-76; Arrell M. Gibson, The Chickasaws (Norman, Okla., 1971), 227-46; Sue Hammond, "Socioeconomic Reconstruction in the Cherokee Nation, 1865-1870," Chronicles of Oklahoma, 56 (Summer 1978), 158-70; Kenny A. Franks, Stand Watie and the Agony of the Cherokee Nation (Memphis, 1979); W. Craig Gaines, The Confederate Cherokees: John Drew's Regiment of Mounted Rifles (Baton Rouge, 1989); Alvin M. Josephy Jr., The Civil War in the American West (New York, 1991); Christine Schultz White and Benton R. White, Now the Wolf Has Come: The Creek Nation in the Civil War (College Station, Tex., 1996); Mary Jane Warde, George Washington Grayson and the Creek Nation, 1843-1920 (Norman, Okla., 1999); and Carolyn Ross Johnston, "'The Panther's Scream is Often Heard': Cherokee Women in Indian Territory during the Civil War," Chronicles of Oklahoma, 78 (Spring 2000), 84-107. Many of these historians discount the importance of slavery in the Civil War in Indian Territory. But as William G. McLoughlin points out, Confederate Indians themselves may be responsible for the origins of this interpretation. After the Civil War southern Cherokees promoted the view that long-standing factionalism rather than slavery had divided the nation. Yet as early as 1859 the Cherokees had formed a proslavery organization called the Knights of the Golden Circle. According to its constitution, "No person shall be a member ... who is not a pro-slavery man." McLoughlin, "Political Polarization and National Unity: The Keetoowah Society, 1860-1871," in McLoughlin, The Cherokees and Christianity, 1794-1870, edited by Walter H. Conser Jr. (Athens, Ga., 1994). 256-59, 276-78 (quotation on p. 259); Patrick N. Minges, Slavery in the Cherokee Nation: The Keetoowah Society and the Defining of a People, 1855-1867 (New York, 2003).

(4) Gibson, Chickasaws, 237-38; Hammond, "Socioeconomic Reconstruction in the Cherokee Nation," 159 (first quotation); William G. McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokees' Struggle for Sovereignty. 1839-1880 (Chapel Hill, 1993), 220 (second quotation).

(5) Michael F. Doran, "Population Statistics of Nineteenth Century Indian Territory," Chronicles of Oklahoma, 53 (Winter 1975-1976), 501. Eric Foner notes of the Dunning school of Reconstruction historiography, "When these writers spoke of 'the South" or 'the people,' they meant whites." Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988), xx.

(6) Michael F. Doran used the U.S. census of 1860 to calculate a slave population of 7,376 (excluding Seminoles), but the census surely undercounts the true number. Hundreds of blacks held by Indians died during the Civil War, and hundreds more did not return to their homes after emancipation. Nonetheless a Creek census of 1869 enumerated 249 more people than did the 1860 census. Similar undercounts occurred in the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Nations. Among the Chickasaws the 1860 census enumerated 975 slaves. But around 1906, U.S. commissioners counted 4,670 Chickasaw ex-slaves and their descendants (an annual growth rate of over 4 percent). One must conclude either that the U.S. commissioners grossly overcounted or that their 1860 predecessors grossly undercounted. A 1907 Choctaw census enumerated 5,994 ex-slaves and their descendants. The 1860 census counted only 2,349. Even the annual growth rate of 2 percent suggested by these two figures is higher than the observed growth rate in the overall black population at the time. Doran, "Population Statistics," 501; Dunn Rolls of 1867 and 1869, Citizens and Freedmen of the Creek Nation, 1867-1869, National Archives microfilm publication P2070 (formerly 7RA5), available at Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City (hereinafter OHS); Gibson, Chickasaws, 274-75; Angie Debo, The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic (Norman, Okla., 1934), 276; Jack E. Eblen, "Growth of the Black Population in ante bellum America, 1820-1860," Population Studies, 26 (July 1972), 279.

(7) William A. Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877 (1907; rpt., New York, 1933); E. Merton Coulter, The South During Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (Baton Rouge, 1947); W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York, 1935); John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction: After the Civil War (Chicago, 1961); Foner, Reconstruction, 246. Two books that address Reconstruction in Indian Territory are Annie Heloise Abel, The American Indian under Reconstruction (Cleveland, 1925) and M. Thomas Bailey, Reconstruction in Indian Territory: A Story of Avarice, Discrimination, and Opportunism (Port Washington, N.Y., 1972).

(8) Franks, Stand Watie and the Agony of the Cherokee Nation; Gaines, Confederate Cherokees; Josephy, Civil War in the West; White and White, Now the Wolf Has Come.

(9) In American history the age of imperialism traditionally begins in 1898 with the Spanish-American War. Yet this periodization overlooks the continuity between the U.S. colonization of Indian country and of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. At the turn of the nineteenth century, politicians and journalists frequently drew explicit connections between Indians, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans and looked to the history of U.S.-Indian relations for lessons on how to govern their overseas colonies. Walter L. Williams, "United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism," Journal of American History, 66 (March 1980), 810-31.

(10) The comparable relationship between imperialism and the ideology of freedom is explored most thoroughly in the literature on the colonization of Africa. See Howard Temperley, British Antislavery, 1833-1870 (London, 1972); Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (London, 1975); Ralph A. Austen, African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency (Portsmouth, N.H., 1987), chap. 5; George Shepperson, "Aspects of American Interest in the Berlin Conference," in Stig Forster, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Ronald Robinson, eds., Bismarck, Europe, and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference, 1884-1885, and the Onset of Partition (Oxford, 1988), 281-93; L. H. Gann, "The Berlin Conference and the Humanitarian Conscience," in ibid., 321-31; Miers, "Humanitarianism at Berlin: Myth or Reality?" in ibid., 333-45; Miers and Richard Roberts, eds., The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison, Wis., 1988); Paul E. Lovejoy and Jan S. Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897-1936 (Cambridge, Eng., 1993); and Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa: The Antislavery Expedition to the River Niger, 1841-1842 (New Haven, 1991). For a present-day example of an abolitionist who confronts the same ethical dilemmas as his nineteenth-century forebears see Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley, Calif., 1999). Recent works that address the meaning of freedom in the age of emancipation include Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge, 1983); Robert J. Kaczorowski, "To Begin the Nation Anew: Congress, Citizenship, and Civil Rights after the Civil War," American Historical Review, 92 (February 1987), 45-68; Foner, Reconstruction; William E. Nelson, The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Principle to Judicial Doctrine (Cambridge, Mass, 1988); Rebecca J. Scott, "Exploring the Meaning of Freedom: Postemancipation Societies in Comparative Perspective," Hispanic American Historical Review, 68 (August 1988), 407-28; Ira Berlin et al., Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge, Eng., 1992); Frank McGlynn and Seymour Drescher. eds., The Meaning of Freedom: Economics, Politics, and Culture after Slavery (Pittsburgh, 1992); David A. J. Richards. Conscience and the Constitution: History, Theory, and Law of the Reconstruction Amendments (Princeton, 1993); Foner, "The Meaning of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation," Journal of American History, 81 (September 1994), 435-60; Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870 (Cambridge, Eng., 1994); Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana, 1997); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge, Eng., 1998); and Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge, Eng., 2001).

(11) Eric Foner neatly lays out these permutations in "Meaning of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation."

(12) This figure was determined using the slave schedules of Indian lands west of Arkansas, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, National Archives Microfilm Series M653-54, and Doran, "Population Statistics." The author wishes to thank Tressie L. Nealy, Sharron Standifer Ashton, and Jack D. Baker of the Oklahoma Historical Society for their assistance in gathering these statistics.

(13) For example see Interview with Edmond Flint, November 29, 1937, in Indian Pioneer Papers, 1860-1935 (113 vols. plus index and addenda; microfiche edition, Greenwich, Conn., 1981), XXX, 315-16 (hereinafter cited as IPP; bound volumes of typescript transcriptions available at OHS); Wiley Britton, The Union Indian Brigade in the Civil War (Kansas City, Mo., 1922), 194-95; Oktarsars Harjo to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, September 9, 1871, in Letters Received, 1824-1907, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75 (hereinafter cited as RG 75), National Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereinafter cited as NA), National Archives Microfilm Series M-234, reel 233, frames 219-23 (hereinafter cited as NAMS M-234).

(14) Grant Foreman, ed., A Traveler in Indian Territory: The Journal of Ethan Allen Hitchcock, late Major-General in the United States Army (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1930), 95-96n56 (first quotation on p. 96); Debo, Road to Disappearance, 290; William Graham to J. C. Lowrie, March 14, 1872, No. 94, Vol. 1, Box L, American Indian Correspondence: The Presbyterian Historical Society Collection of Missionaries' Letters, 1833-1893 (Westport, Conn., 1978), microfilm, reel 29 (other quotations).

(15) Britton, Union Brigade in the Civil War, 194-95 (first quotation on p. 194); Grant Foreman, ed., Traveler in Indian Territory, 187 (second and third quotations).

(16) See, for example, Interview with Ed Butler, July 17, 1937, IPP, XIV, 82-85; and Baker and Baker, eds.. WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives, 82-83, 171-81, 224-28. For an extended study on how slavery and kinship were often indistinguishable in the colonial Southwest see James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2002).

(17) Interview with Charley Moore Brown, June 14, 1937, IPP, XII, 22-26 (first quotation on p. 23); Interview with Ed Butler, July 17, 1937, IPP, XIV, 82-85 (second quotation); Interview with Tony Carolina, September 15, 1937, IPP, XVI, 85-89; Interview with J. E. Barbour, January 27, 1938, IPP, V, 193-95.

(18) Carolyn Thomas Foreman, "North Fork Town," Chronicles of Oklahoma, 29 (Spring 1951), 81-82; Interview with Alex Haynes, May 21, 1937, IPP, XL, 298-99 (first quotation); John D. Lang and Samuel Taylor Jr., Report of a Visit to Some of the Tribes of Indians Located West of the Mississippi River (Providence, 1843), 40-41 (second quotation on p. 41).

(19) Grant Foreman, The Five Civilized Tribes (Norman, Okla., 1934), 187; Grant Foreman, ed., Traveler in Indian Territory, 95 96n56 (first quotation); Alice Mary Robertson, "In going from Tullahassee ...," Folder 4, Box 2, Series I, Alice Robertson Collection (McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa) (second and third quotations).

(20) Will of Abraham Foster, December 19, 1864, Document 39508, Creek National Records (hereinafter CRN), OHS, microfilm, reel 51; Muster roll of a company of Creek Indians, February 14, 1846, NAMS M-234, reel 240, frame 391.

(21) William Steele to S. S. Anderson, February 15, 1864, Letters Sent, District of Indian Territory, Oct 1863-June 1864, Chap. II, Vol. 267, War Department Collection of Confederate Records, Record Group 109, NA (hereinafter RG 109).

(22) Claim no. 45, Perry McIntosh and Claim no. 56, Soda Hawkins, Box 1, Entry 687, Records Relating to Loyal Creek Claims, 1869-1870, RG 75. By sending his slave to Texas during the war, McIntosh's owner followed the actions of many white southerners who hoped to protect their human property in the same way. Berlin et al., Slaves No More, 56. The nature of the transition from slavery to freedom reflects the character of slavery itself, as African scholars have long recognized. Richard Roberts and Suzanne Miers, "The End of Slavery in Africa," in Miers and Roberts, eds., End of Slavery in Africa, 27-33.

(23) Baker and Baker, eds., WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives, 30-34 (first quotation on p. 31), 171-80 (second quotation on p. 174).

(24) Barbara J. Fields observes, "The Reconstruction amendments asserted the supremacy of the national state and the formal equality under the law of everyone within it. In so doing, they eliminated competing bases of sovereignty (such as the relation of master and slave) and set forth in the organic law that there was one and only one source of citizenship, that citizenship was to be nationally defined, and that the rights, privileges, and immunities deriving from citizenship arose from the federal Constitution." Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York and Oxford, 1982), 163. See also Steven Hahn, "Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective," American Historical Review, 95 (February 1990), 75-98. The relationship between emancipation and civil and political rights is explored in Vorenberg, Final Freedom. On natural rights, the federal government, and Reconstruction see Kaczorowski, "To Begin the Nation Anew."

(25) The violence of the Civil War in Indian Territory is described, somewhat melodramatically, in White and White, Now the Wolf Has Come.

(26) Report of D. N. Cooley, October 30, 1865, in H. Exdoc., 39 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 1 (Serial 1248), 482-83. The proposal for a territory-wide government was contained in Senate Bill 459, which provided for the creation of governmental machinery similar to that found in other organized U.S. territories. Abel, American Indian under Reconstruction, chap. 7.

(27) Quoted in Abel, American Indian under Reconstruction, 255 (first quotation); Report of John B. Sanborn, January 5, 1866, in H. Exdoc., 39 Cong., 2 Sess., No. 1 (Serial 1284), 285 (second quotation).

(28) "Official report of the proceedings of the council with the Indians ... held at Fort Smith, Arkansas, in September, 1865," in H. Exdoc., 39 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 1 (Serial 1248), 502 (quotations); Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 51-60.

(29) The uncertainty over the meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment is evident in the state ratification debates. Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 212-33.

(30) "Official report of the proceedings of the council with the Indians" (Serial 1248), 525 (first quotation), 518 (second and third quotations).

(31) The custom of adopting slaves is discussed in the context of the Southwest in Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 174-93, 241-50.

(32) Oktarsars Harjo et al. to Perry Fuller, January 28, 1868, NAMS M-234, reel 231, frames 534-44. Oktarsars Harjo repeated his complaints elsewhere. See Oktarsars Harjo to J. D. Cox, April 5, 1869, NAMS M-234, reel 232, frames 171-74.

(33) "Official report of the proceedings of the council with the Indians" (Serial 1248), 509 (first quotation), 529 (second quotation); McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears, 208. The Chickasaws and Choctaws submitted a slightly revised version of this document a few days later. It is reprinted in "Official report of the proceedings of the council with the Indians" (Serial 1248), 533-34. The extent of the Choctaw and Chickasaw commitment to the Confederacy is reflected in the small number of Unionist tribal members who submitted claims for destroyed property after the war. Whereas 1,523 loyal Creeks submitted claims, only 92 Choctaws and Chickasaws did so. Entry 688, Abstract of Loyal Creek Claims, RG 75.

(34) "Official report of the proceedings of the council with the Indians" (Serial 1248), 534-35.

(35) Report of D. N. Cooley (Serial 1248), 490 (first four quotations); Daniel N. McIntosh and James M. C. Smith to D. N. Cooley et al., March 18, 1866, NAMS M-234, reel 231, frames 98-108 (final two quotations).

(36) For ex-slaves who testified to having Indian fathers see Interview with Alex Haynes, May 21, 1937, IPP, XL, 298-99; and Interview with George McIntosh, 1937, IPP, LVIII, 319. See also Prissie Carruthers, jacket 638, and Arceny Wofford, jacket 1033, Applications for Enrollment of the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, 1898-1914, RG 75, National Archives Microfilm Series M-1301, reel 331. The early origins of Indian racism can be studied in William S. Willis, "Divide and Rule: Red, White, and Black in the Southeast," Journal of Negro History, 48 (July 1963), 157-76; William G. McLoughlin, "Red Indians, Black Slavery and White Racism: America's Slaveholding Indians." American Quarterly, 26 (October 1974), 367-85; James H. Merrell, "The Racial Education of the Catawba Indians," Journal of Southern History, 50 (August 1984), 363-84; Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society; Kathryn E. Holland Braund, "The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery," Journal of Southern History, 57 (November 1991), 601-36; and Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (New York, 1999), chap. 5. For an important and original contribution to the literature see Nancy Shoemaker, "How Indians Got to Be Red," American Historical Review, 102 (June 1997), 625-44.

(37) Quoted in Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 187 (first quotation); Daniel N. McIntosh and James M. C. Smith to D. N. Cooley et al., March 18, 1866, NAMS M-234, reel 231, frames 98-108 (second quotation).

(38) "How to secure a class of non-citizen laborers without imperiling the life of their nation has been a deep problem still unsolved," wrote the Muskogee Indian Journal in reference to the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations (June 30, 1881, p. 6).

(39) S. N. Clark to O. O. Howard, February 1, 1870, Letters Received, A-C, Jan.-Aug. 1870, Registers and Letters Received by the Commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, NA (hereinafter cited as RG 105), National Archives Microfilm Series M-742, reel 67, frame 585 (hereinafter cited as NAMS M-742) (first and second quotations); Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in H. Exdoc., 49 Cong., 2 Sess., No. 1 (Serial 2467), 83, 367 (third quotation).

(40) "Official report of the proceedings of the council with the Indians" (Serial 1248), 529 (first quotation); Daniel N. McIntosh and James M. C. Smith to D. N. Cooley et al., March 18. 1866, NAMS M-234, reel 231, frames 98-108 (other quotations). The relationship between racism and Indian nationalism remains surprisingly unexplored. For one work on the subject see Erik March Zissu, "Blood Matters: The Five Civilized Tribes and the Search for Unity in the Early Twentieth Century" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1998).

(41) "Official report of the proceedings of the council with the Indians" (Serial 1248), 514-15 (quotation). At least one Native American believed that the best defense of native sovereignty lay not in denying the United States the authority to emancipate slaves but in refusing it the power to force the Five Tribes to re-extend citizenship to former Confederate Indians. S. W. Perryman to William S. Robertson, July 28, 1865, Document 209, Folder 6, Box 18, Series II, Alice Robertson Collection.

(42) Francis Springer to J. W. Sprague, December 4, 1865, enclosed in J. W. Sprague to O. O. Howard, December 18, 1865, RG 105, National Archives Microfilm Series M-752, reel 22, frame 631 (hereinafter cited as NAMS M-752) (first quotation); Treaty of 1863, Document 29690. Folder 10, Box 20, Federal Relations, CRN, microfilm, reel 34 (second quotation). A lawyer for ex-slaves later made a compelling case for the application of the Thirteenth Amendment to Indian Territory, but the U.S. Court of Claims rejected it. The United States v. the Choctaw Nation and the Chickasaw Nation and the Chickasaw Freedmen (1903), 23115, Entry 1, Box 1648, Records of the United States Court of Claims, Record Group 123, NA (hereinafter cited as RG 123). For the Supreme Court decision in this case see 193 U.S. 115 (1904).

(43) In the federal district court decision U.S. v. Payne (8 F. 883 [1881] at 891) I. C. Parker, the "hanging judge," suggested that slavery was abolished in Indian Territory by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. Senate Docs., 55 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 157: Rights of Chickasaw Freedmen (Serial 3563), 7.

(44) The United States v. the Choctaw Nation and the Chickasaw Nation and the Chickasaw Freedmen, RG 123.

(45) Monday Durant to W. P. Dole, February 23, 1864, NAMS M-234, reel 231, frame 4 (first quotation); Report of John B. Sanborn, January 5, 1866 (Serial 1284), 284-85 (second and third quotation on p. 284); Foner, Reconstruction, 45, 50.

(46.) J. H. Leard to O. O. Howard, October 25, 1865, NAMS M-752, reel 21, frame 774 (quotation); Foner, Reconstruction, 119-21.

(47) "Official report of the proceedings of the council with the Indians" (Serial 1248), 542 (quotation); Report of John B. Sanborn, January 5, 1866 (Serial 1284), 284.

(48) S. N. Clark to O. O. Howard, February 1, 1870, NAMS M-742, reel 67, frame 585; Foner, Reconstruction, 46, 193-94.

(49) Report of John B. Sanborn, January 5, 1866 (Serial 1284), 284.

(50) In 1866 these freedmen petitioned Congress for immediate removal from the Chickasaw lands: "Our position is much different from that occupied by the freedmen of the States, for their former masters are white men, While ours are Indians, with all the hatred and vindictiveness of their Race, towards a weaker Race, who, they formerly controled and oppressed." Charley Cohe et al. to M. W. Chollar, December 8, 1866, pp. 662-64, enclosed in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations v. the U.S., F-181, Entry 1, Box 3663, RG 123.

(51) Report of John B. Sanborn, January 5, 1866 (Serial 1284), 284 (quotation); Francis Springer to J. W. Sprague, December 4, 1865, enclosed in J. W. Sprague to O. O. Howard, December 18, 1865, NAMS M-752, reel 22, frame 631; J. W. Sprague to O. O. Howard, December 18, 1865, NAMS M-752, reel 22, frame 614.

(52) A. W. Ballard to J. W. Sprague, November 30, 1865, enclosed in J. W. Sprague to O. O. Howard, December 18, 1865, NAMS M-752, reel 22, frame 614 (first quotation); Report of John B. Sanborn, January 5, 1866 (Serial 1284), 284 (second quotation).

(53) Francis Springer to J. W. Sprague, December 4, 1865, enclosed in J. W. Sprague to O. O. Howard. December 18, 1865. NAMS M-752, reel 22, frame 631 (first quotation); Report of John B. Sanborn, January 5, 1866 (Serial 1284), 285 (second quotation). In a second report written a few weeks later, Sanborn explained that the Chickasaws' and Choctaws' prejudice against their ex-slaves was "rapidly passing away, and their treatment of them has not been so bad and cruel as might be inferred from my former report and letters, although there is still much that is wrong and cruel." His optimism was not borne out by future events. Report of John B. Sanborn, January 27, 1866, in H. Exdoc., 39 Cong., 2 Sess., No. 1 (Serial 1284), 286.

(54) Quoted in Foner, Reconstruction, 495. See also Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York. 1998), 134-35.

(55) Bailey, Reconstruction in Indian Territory, 68-69.

(56) Josephy, Civil War in the American West; Laurence M. Hauptman, Between Two Fires: American Indians in the Civil War (New York, 1995); Foner, Reconstruction. 494-97. Regarding Indian Territory see Samuel R. Curtis to William A. Phillips, February 11, 1864, in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (70 vols. in 128; Washington, D.C., 1880-1901), Ser. I, Vol. XXXIV, Pt. II, 301-2: hereinafter cited as Official Records; and William A. Phillips to Samuel R. Curtis, February 29, 1864, in Official Records, Ser. 1, Vol. XXXIV, Pt. II, 467-68.

(57) Abel, American Indian under Reconstruction, 321, 325, 337, 341, 361.

(58) Bailey, Reconstruction in Indian Territory, 69-71.

(59) Daniel N. McIntosh and James M. C. Smith to D. N. Cooley et al., March 18, 1866, NAMS M-234, reel 231, frames 98-108.

(60) Daniel N, McIntosh and James M. C. Smith to D. N. Cooley, May 22, 1866, NAMS M-234, reel 231, frames 120-23 (quotations); Stanley N. Katz, "The Strange Birth and Unlikely History of Constitutional Equality," Journal of American History, 75 (December 1988), 754; Kaczorowski, "To Begin the Nation Anew," 52.

(61) Lewis V. Bogy to W. Byers, November 9, 1866. enclosed in J. B. Jones to J. B. Simmons, August 22, 1867, NAMS M-752, reel 49, frame 912.

(62) McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears, 224-26.

(63) Bailey, Reconstruction in Indian Territory, 72.

(64) "Appendix--37" ["from the Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners to the Secretary of the Interior, for the President, for the Year 1870"], Chronicles of Oklahoma, 5 (March 1927), 79-94 (quotations on p. 91); Saunt, New Order of Things, chap. 10. Kevin Mulroy and Susan Miller assert that intermarriage between blacks and Seminoles was less common than other historians suggest. All impressionistic evidence indicates, however, that Seminoles married blacks far more frequently than did the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees. Mulroy, Freedom on the Border; 21 ; Susan A. Miller, Coacoochee's Bones: A Seminole Saga (Lawrence, Kans., 2003), 59.

(65) Deposition of Oktarsarsharjo, Coweta Micco, Cotchuteseh, and Harry Island, July 4, 1867, enclosed in J. B. Jones to J. B. Simmons, August 22, 1867, NAMS M-752, reel 49, frame 912.

(66) Oktarsars Harjo et al. to Perry Fuller, January 28, 1868, NAMS M-234, reel 231, frames 534-44 (first and second quotations); Oktarsars Harjo to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, October 26, 1869, NAMS M-234, reel 232, frames 144-9 (other quotations).

(67) S. N. Clark to O. O. Howard, February 1, 1870, NAMS M-742, reel 67, frame 585.

(68) "An act rejecting the adoption of the freedmen in the Chickasaw Nation, October 22, 1885," Entry 713, Box 48, Special Files, Records of the Indian Territory Division, Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior, Record Group 48, NA (hereinafter cited as RG 48).

(69) Senate Reports, 49 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 1278, Part 2: Report of the Committee on Indian Affairs ... (Serial 2363, Washington, D.C., 1886), 73-74.

(70) The United States v. the Choctaw Nation and the Chickasaw Nation and the Chickasaw Freedmen, RG 123.

(71) A. Parsons to E. P. Smith, March 6, 1874, pp. 862-63, enclosed in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations v. the U.S., F-181, Entry I, Box 3663, RG 123 (first and second quotations); Nelson Coleman to James F. A. Sisson, July 19, 1880, Entry 604, Folder 1880, Letters Received Relating to the Choctaw and Other Freedmen, 1878-1884, RG 75 (third and fourth quotations).

(72) John Wilson to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. August 16, 1880, pp. 996-97 (first quotation), and Charles Anderson to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, August 16, 1881, pp. 1010-14 (second quotation), both enclosed in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations v. the U.S., F-181, Entry 1, Box 3664, RG 123.

(73) For an extended examination of the political strategies employed by freedpeople in Indian Territory see Barbara Krauthamer, "Blacks on the Borders: African-Americans' Transition from Slavery to Freedom in Texas and the Indian Territory, 1836-1907" (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2000).

(74) Noble Washington to the Secretary of the Interior, July 23, 1885, Entry 713, Box 48, RG 48. Entry 713 contains numerous letters from former slaves in Indian Territory. The lack of educational facilities was a constant complaint of Chickasaw and Choctaw ex-slaves. See Littlefield, Chickasaw Freedmen, chap. 5.

(75) J. J. Briarley to Grover Cleveland, March 11, 1886 (first quotation); Toney Henderson to the Secretary of the Interior, June 11, 1888 (second and third quotations); George W. Shields to the Secretary of the Interior, May 1, 1887 (fourth and fifth quotations), all in Entry 713, Box 48, RG 48. Henderson mistakenly described the penalty for intermarriage as one hundred lashes. The Choctaw act against intermarriage was formed at a time when southern states were renewing similar laws and punishing black-white marriages with extralegal violence. An Act to Prevent Inter-Marriage between Choctaws and Freedmen, November 6, 1885, ibid.; Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, 1997), chap. 7.

(76) Reuben Sanders et al. to the Secretary of the Interior, enclosed in E. P. Smith to the Secretary of the Interior, November 23, 1874 (quotation); Tams Bixby to the Secretary of the Interior, October 18, 1902, both in Entry 713, Box 48, RG 48. Some participants in this battle remember it occurring in 1867.

(77) John Q. Tufts to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, January 26, 1882, Entry 713, Box 48, RG 48.

(78) Reuben Sanders et al. to the Secretary of the Interior, enclosed in E. P. Smith to the Secretary of the Interior, November 23, 1874 (first and second quotations); John Q. Tufts to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, January 26, 1882, both in Entry 713, Box 48, RG 48; Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in H. Exdoc., 47 Cong., 2 Sess., No. 1 (Serial 2100), 45-46 (third quotation on p. 46).

(79) Folders 204-7, Cherokee Nation Papers, OHS, microfilm, reel 3.

(80) Report of the Committee on Indian Affairs (Serial 2363), 16.

(81) John McDonald to Indian affairs, July 22, 1884, Entry 604, Folder 1884, Letters Received Relating to the Choctaw and Other Freedmen, 1878-1884, RG 75 (first and second quotations); John McDonald to the President of the United States, February 26, 1887, Entry 713, Box 48, RG 48 (third, fourth, and fifth quotations).

(82) Littlefield, Cherokee Freedmen, chaps. 5-9 (quotation on pp. 191-92). The decision U.S. v. Kagama (118 U.S. 375 [1886]) established Congress's plenary power over Indian nations. See Sidney L. Harring, Crow Dog's Case: American Indian Sovereignty, Tribal Law, and United States Law in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Eng., 1994).

(83) J. W. Bertholf to C. J. Harris, March 16, 1894, Folder 2502, Cherokee Nation Papers, reel 23 (quotations); T. M. Buffington, "The Cherokee Freedman Report," Tulsa Democrat, November 15, 1901, p. 2. Copy in Folder 7980, Cherokee Nation Papers, reel 51.

(84) Typed copy of undated fragment, Folder 6478, Cherokee Nation Papers, reel 46.

(85) A. P. McKellop, comp., Constitution and Laws of the Muskogee Nation (1893; rpt., Wilmington, Del., 1973), 198; J. W. Dunn to W. Byers, January 1, 1866, enclosed in J. B. Jones to J. B. Simmons, August 22, 1867, NAMS M-752, reel 49, frame 912; J. W. Dunn to J. B. Jones, May 28, 1867, enclosed in J. B. Jones to J. B. Simmons, August 22, 1867, ibid.; J. B. Jones to O. O. Howard, August 10, 1867, ibid.

(86) Oktarsars Harjo et al. to Perry Fuller, January 28, 1868, NAMS M-234, reel 231, frames 534-44. Oktarsars Harjo repeated his complaints elsewhere. See Oktarsars Harjo to J. D. Cox, April 5, 1869, NAMS M-234, reel 232, frames 171-74.

(87) William A. Sapulpa, "Sapulpa," Chronicles of Oklahoma, 4 (December 1926), 329-32.

(88) W. A. Sapulpa et al. to the Dawes Commission, September 23, 1896, (quotations); Dawes Commission to W. A. Sapulpa et al., September 26, 1896, Document 30041, Folder 7, Box 21, Federal Relations, CRN, microfilm, reel 35.

(89) William Graham to General Walker, August 31, 1872, NAMS M-234, reel 233, frames 583-48.

(90) Quoted in Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 203; Mulroy, Freedom on the Border, 161. Remarkably, not a single monograph explores the history of the Seminole ex-slaves in Indian Territory after 1866.

(91) Quoted in Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles, 193 (first quotation): James L. Grayson to the Secretary of the Interior, February 25, 1899, Dawes Commission, Creek Correspondence, 65-4, OHS (second and third quotations).

(92) Susan Grayson, Creek 8428, Entry 552, Individual Indian Case Files, RG 75, National Archives, Southwest Region, Fort Worth, Tex.

(93) Monday Durant to W. P. Dole, February 23, 1864, NAMS M-234, reel 231, frame 4; Charles Anderson to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, August 16, 1881, pp. 1010-14, enclosed in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations v. the U.S., F-181, Entry I, Box 3664, RG 123; Toney Henderson to the Secretary of the Interior, June 11, 1888, Entry 713, Box 48. RG 48.

(94) Quoted in Murray R. Wickett, Contested Territory: Whites, Native Americans, and African Americans in Oklahoma, 1865-1907 (Baton Rouge, 2000), 52-53.

(95) On reformers and the paradoxes of Indian policy in the post-Civil War years see Henry E. Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 1860-1890 (Philadelphia, 1963); Robert Winston Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indian (Columbia, Mo., 1971); Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865-1900 (Norman, Okla., 1976); Prucha, "The Board of Indian Commissioners and the Delegates of the Five Tribes." in Prucha, Indian Policy in the United States: Historical Essays (Lincoln, Neb., 1981), 198-213; Robert H. Keller Jr., American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 1869-82 (Lincoln, Neb., 1983); and Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (Lincoln, Neb., 1984).

(96) Quoted in Mardock, Reformers and the American Indian, 17-18, 81. Mardock argues that many abolitionists later become Indian reformers, but see Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis, 26n52, which says that the relationship between abolitionists and Indian reformers was weaker than Mardock suggests. See also Linda K. Kerber, "The Abolitionist Perception of the Indian," Journal of American History, 62 (September 1975), 271-95.

(97) Although some Americans initially believed that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to Indians, the Supreme Court ruled that it did not in Elk v. Wilkins (1884). John R. Wunder, "Retained by the People": A History of American Indians and the Bill of Rights (New York and Oxford, 1994), 46; Nelson, Fourteenth Amendment, 102-3.

(98) Most Indians in the Five Tribes objected not to their exclusion from American freedom but to American freedom itself, with its roots in individualism and its emphasis on political and civil equality. But see Foner, Story of American Freedom, 78-79.

(99) For example see Davis v. United States (192 F.3d 951 [10th Cir. 1999)]). In December 2001 the Cherokee Supreme Court decided a citizenship case (JAT 97-03-K) against Bernice Riggs, a descendant of Cherokee slaves.

MR. SAUNT is an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia.