I covered a lot of this in my book on _Race and Radicalism in the Union Army_.
In a nutshell, African slavery existed under native peoples in the Indian Territory the way it did because the whites imposed it. The U.S. peopled the territory with Indian "nations" (particularly the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole). They were not western nation-states but the status of "nation" was imposed on them. The U.S. had a nice little cookie cutter government with a Principal Chief and a General Council that it got the right people to adopt. This permitted the U.S. the legal nicety of being able to have treaties signed by designated national bodies. Slavery in the sense that it's being discussed here was imposed the same way. Native peoples were removed from Southern states could have slaves under the laws of those states, but it did not exist on the scale it did after their removal for a simple reason. While taking the land, the U.S. authorities agreed under the treaties of removal to respect the property of the people they were removing, but regarded blacks living among them as runaways that would be resold into slavery. In response, those blacks often wound up going to the local chief and asking that they be claimed as property, which would allow them to be removed west and resettled in the territory. This is why you have the sources describing an Indian chief owning 200 slaves on paper living as a poor "blanket Indian" which a patch of ground and a cabin with little else. Unlike the short life of having been sod off onto a Georgia plantation, blacks in territory had a very wide range of experiences. Among the Creek and the Seminole, blacks even lived in their own communities and had their own plots of land. Elsewhere, what happened often seemed to resolve a negotiation of sorts over what it would mean. The WPA slave narratives indicate the level of independence this often entailed. Certainly, the slave dealers form neighboring states had no use for those from the territory, who were simply used to living with a great deal more freedom of action. The exception were probably the cotton plantations some of the Choctaw built along the border with Texas, though these came rather late in the process. When the Civil War broke out . . . but, wait, just read the damned book. The point is that the first blacks that fought for the Union did so as part of the Indian Home Guard regiments, raised not along racial lines but simply based on residence. And commanded by former followers of John Brown, etc. The treatment of slavery among native peoples in the territory as essentially the same as among the whites was a fiction imposed in 1865 by the Fort Smith conference in which the U.S. authorities despicably set aside the claims of the Unionist governing bodies among the Indians to recognize the legitimacy of the Confederate puppet regimes. To me, this was one of several immediate post-war betrayals that pointed at what the ultimate outcome of Reconstruction would be. Most immediately, this permitted the U.S. to set aside the obligations of the old treaties and redivide the lands accorded those nations to make room for Indians being displaced across the rest of the West--and to gouge out a massive land grant through the middle of the Indian Territory for the railroad. Funny how that worked out. Cheers, Mark L. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#1368): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/1368 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76707943/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: marxmail+ow...@groups.io Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [arch...@mail-archive.com] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
