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Feb 9, 2023 · SUMMARY. The American Civil War was fought from 1861 until 1865. It began after Virginia and ten other states in the southern United States seceded from the Union following the election of Abraham Lincoln as U.S. president in 1860.
Dec 27, 2021 · Instead, the Civil War proved to be the Native American's last effort to stop the tidal wave of American expansion. While the war raged and African Americans were proclaimed free, the U.S. government continued its policies of pacification and removal of Native Americans.
- An Old Feud ‘Burst Forth in All Its Fury’
- Three Different Factions Take Up Arms
- The Union-Backed Home Guard Invades from The North, Seizes Ross
- Confederate Guerrillas Ravage Cherokee Communities
- Reconciliation at Last
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Indian Territory encompassed most of the area now occupied by the state of Oklahoma. Ancestral home to tribal nations including Osage, Quapaw, Seneca and Shawnee, it had also become the mandated home for the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations (known as the Five Civilized Tribes). Between 1...
In October of 1861, Ross relented to growing pressure and signed a treaty with the Confederate States of America, which promised the Cherokee nation protection, food and other resources in exchange for several regiments’ worth of soldiers and access into their territory for building roads and forts. Unpopular with most Cherokees, the treaty allowed...
By spring of 1862, James G. Blunt, brigadier general of the Kansas Union forces, wanted to raise an Indian expeditionary force to infiltrate Confederate-ridden Indian Territory. Intel had encouraged his belief that the Cherokee’s Principal Chief Ross was not only sympathetic to the North, but could be persuaded to abandon his Confederate alliance. ...
After the Home Guard withdrew, Watie’s regiment of nearly 700 strong began reprisals that ravaged Cherokee society. The war in and around Indian Territory raged through the fall and winter of 1862, with the Indian Home Guard regiments redeployed in Kansas and Missouri, then moving back into Indian Territory to serve as a crucial fighting force in a...
General Stand Watie, the persistent nemesis of the Ross Party and the Union Indian Home Guard, was the last Confederate general to surrender on June 23, 1865. And Principal Chief John Ross died on August 1, 1866, in Washington, D.C., still negotiating a Cherokee Nation treaty with the United States. Reconciliation did eventually emerge. “The legacy...
- Bryan Pollard
- 3 min
Time Period. 1861 to 1876. Topics. Black History. Civil War. Politics & Government. Introduction. Slavery caused the war, but the war was not begun to free the slaves. The war was begun to determine whether the Confederate States of America would be allowed to break away as an independent nation, or whether the existing United States would survive.
Colonization by European settlers threatened Indigenous people’s very existence through war, by forcibly removing them from their ancestral land, and attempting to erase their language and culture. With resilience and resistance, Indigenous nations persisted in affirming their cultural identities.
The Civil War devastated the Five Tribes’ economic self-sufficiency, partly because of fraud and theft committed against Indian peoples—sometimes by other Indians. Unionists and Confederates raided one another’s farms, devastating the productive agricultural economy that the nations had built in the decades since their removal.
The war exacted a terrible toll on Indigenous people. One-third of all Cherokees and Seminoles in Indian Territory died from violence, starvation, and war-related illness. Despite their sacrifice, American Indians would discover that their tribal lands were even less secure after the war.
