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The Nations in the War Over Slavery

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

The Nations in the War Over Slavery — Indigenous Service in the American Civil War

Status: Researched draft — cultural review pending

How to read this entry: Documented Fact = the fact stands in a named source — the treaty texts, the official records of both armies, the nations' own historians, freedmen descendants' testimony and litigation record, and the United States Government Accountability Office's 2025 accounting of the freedmen question. Tradition — the people's own account = what the nations and the descendants teach. Debated / Claim = a disputed point, labelled where it stands. This entry smooths nothing: the nations in this war stood on both sides of it, some of their elites held human beings in slavery, and the descendants of the people they enslaved are still in court over the citizenship the peace promised them. Each of those lines is documented, and each is printed.

One generation. The Cherokee regiments of 1861 marched out of a nation that had been driven west on the Trail of Tears in 1838–39 — within the living memory of every older person in those ranks, and carried, as the strand's Removal Roads class records, with enslaved people walking the same roads in chains. The Muscogee who followed Opothleyahola to Kansas were the children and grandchildren of the people who had resisted removal from Alabama. The war over slavery and union did not come to nations at peace with the country fighting it. It came to nations that country had removed within a generation — and they fought in it anyway, on both sides, for reasons that were their own.

1. A territory divided against itself

Documented Fact. When the war began in April 1861, the United States abandoned its forts in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), and the Confederacy moved at once to fill the vacuum: Commissioner Albert Pike negotiated treaties of alliance with the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole nations through the summer of 1861. Every one of the five nations signed — on paper. The papers concealed what the territory's own people knew: the nations were split to the root. The old wounds of Removal — in the Cherokee Nation, the Treaty Party that had signed the removal treaty and the National Party that had resisted it, a feud that had already run to assassinations in 1839 — lay directly under the new division. Principal Chief John Ross first proclaimed Cherokee neutrality, then, with Confederate armies on his borders and no Union help in sight, signed the alliance; Ross was carried into Union lines in 1862 and spent the rest of the war in exile, and in February 1863 the Cherokee National Council repudiated the Confederate treaty and abolished slavery in the Cherokee Nation by its own act. The other nations split likewise, formally or in fact: Choctaw and Chickasaw councils held to the Confederacy; the Muscogee and Seminole nations broke in two, and their loyal halves made the flight recorded in §2.

2. The Union service

Documented Fact — Opothleyahola and the flight to Kansas. The loyal Muscogee leader Opothleyahola — Speaker of the Upper Creek Council, in his eighties, a man who had opposed removal all his life — refused the Confederate alliance outright and wrote to President Lincoln in August 1861 asking federal protection. Thousands gathered to him: loyal Muscogee, Seminole under Halleck Tustenuggee, and enslaved and free Black people, including some 150–200 armed African Muscogee and African Seminole men who fought in the battles that followed (Gary Zellar's accounting, the standard history of the exodus). Washington directed him to bring his people to Fort Row, Kansas. Confederate Colonel Douglas H. Cooper pursued with some 1,400 men, including Confederate Muscogee and Choctaw troops. The loyalists fought him off at Round Mountain (19 November 1861), fought again at Chusto-Talasah (9 December), and were broken at Chustenahlah (26 December), in a blizzard, losing nearly everything they carried. Of roughly 9,000 people who set out, an estimated 2,000 died — in the fighting, and of exposure and disease on the flight and in the Kansas camps that followed. Survivors remembered the road by the name this entry keeps: the Trail of Blood on Ice. Opothleyahola died in the refugee camp near the Sac and Fox Agency at Quenemo, Kansas, on 22 March 1863 (the Oklahoma Historical Society's entry). His people did not stay refugees: from those camps the Union raised its Indian regiments.

Documented Fact — the Indian Home Guards. From the refugees of Indian Territory, the Union organised three regiments of Indian Home Guards — some 3,500 men in the usual estimate — Muscogee, Seminole, Cherokee and others, officered in part by their own leaders, which fought to take the territory back: at Cabin Creek (July 1863), where Native, Black and white Union troops fought side by side in one of the war's first such actions in the official record, and at Honey Springs (17 July 1863), the largest battle fought in Indian Territory, where the Home Guards stood in the line beside the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry and won the territory's decisive Union victory. The armed Black men of the exodus were among the first Black soldiers to fight the Confederacy in the war — a year before the Union's eastern armies fielded Black regiments in number — and the entry records them here, in the nations' war, because that is where their service stands in the record.

Documented Fact — Company K, and the Seneca at Appomattox. In the east, the most famous Native unit in Union service was Company K of the 1st Michigan Sharpshooters — Anishinaabe men, Odawa and Ojibwe in the main, with Potawatomi, Delaware, Huron and Oneida men among them — which served in the Army of the Potomac through the Overland Campaign and the siege of Petersburg. At Shand House, east of Petersburg, they captured some 600 Confederate troops. In their last fight, at the Battle of the Crater on 30 July 1864, surrounded and out of ammunition, wounded Company K men died in a way a Union officer of the 13th United States Colored Troops recorded and the record has kept: "Some of them were mortally wounded, and drawing their blouses over their faces, they chanted a death song and died — four of them in a group." And at the war's eastern end, the surrender itself passed through a Seneca hand. Ely S. Parker — Donehogawa, Keeper of the Western Door of the Haudenosaunee — was Grant's military secretary. Parker had been refused admission to the New York bar because, as a tribal member, he was not a United States citizen; refused an officer's commission at the war's start for the same reason; and commissioned at last through Grant's intervention. At the McLean House on 9 April 1865, when the terms were agreed and Grant's other aide was too overcome to write the fair copy, Parker wrote out the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia in his own hand. Lee, seeing him, extended his hand with the words Parker himself recorded: "I am glad to see one real American here." Parker's answer stands in his own record: "We are all Americans." He was brevetted brigadier general — one of only two Native men to hold general's rank in that war. The other held it for the other side (§3).

3. The Confederate service, stated as plainly

Documented Fact — Stand Watie. The Cherokee Treaty Party's leader Stand Watie (Degataga) raised the Cherokee Mounted Rifles for the Confederacy, fought through the territory's war — a civil war inside the Civil War, in which his forces burned the homes and fields of Union Cherokee families and drove thousands into the Kansas refugee columns from the other direction — and was promoted brigadier general in 1864, the only Native man to hold that rank in Confederate service. Cherokee voters' majority repudiated the Confederate alliance in 1863; Watie did not. He kept his command in the field nearly a month after the surrender of the Trans-Mississippi, and on 23 June 1865, at Doaksville in the Choctaw Nation, he surrendered his battalion of Cherokee, Creek, Seminole and Osage troops to Lieutenant-Colonel Asa C. Matthews — the last Confederate general to lay down his arms, seventy-five days after Appomattox. The war over slavery therefore ended, at its paperwork, the way §2 showed it ending in Virginia: with Native officers at the table — a Seneca writing the first great surrender, a Cherokee signing the last.

Documented Fact — Thomas's Legion and the Eastern Band. In the east of the old Cherokee homeland, the Cherokee who had remained — the Eastern Band — were raised for the Confederacy by their adopted chief and agent William Holland Thomas: the "Junaluska Zouaves" of September 1861 became the Cherokee companies of Thomas's Legion, some two hundred Eastern Cherokee men among them, about a hundred and thirty from Quallatown alone, serving in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee in a war of raids and reprisals along the border. The Legion's surrender at Waynesville in May 1865 stood among the last east of the Mississippi. The entry states the division without decorating it: the Eastern Band's service, like the territory nations', was a small people's bid to protect a homeland by the alliance at hand — and the alliance at hand was the slaveholders' republic. Beside them, Choctaw and Chickasaw battalions served the Confederacy in the territory, and the Lumbee of North Carolina fought the Confederacy at home in their own way — the Lowrie war of guerrilla resistance against Confederate conscription and the Home Guard, which the State of North Carolina's own archives record and Lumbee memory keeps as its people's account.

4. The hard truth inside it: slavery in the nations

Documented Fact, unsmoothed. Slavery was not only something done to the nations in this war; within the five nations of Indian Territory, it was something some of the nations' own people did to others. Through the early nineteenth century, elites in the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee and Seminole nations adopted chattel slavery on the southern model, and the enslaved were driven west on the Removal roads with their enslavers. The federal census of 1860 counted 2,511 enslaved people held in the Cherokee Nation alone, and several thousand more across the other four nations — roughly a tenth of the territory's people held as property. The great slaveholders stood at the top of the nations' politics: men like Joseph Vann, "Rich Joe Vann"; John Ross himself held enslaved people; so did the leaders of the faction that opposed him. When Opothleyahola's column fled to Kansas, enslaved people fled to it — gambling that the loyal nations' road led toward freedom — and Black Muscogee and Seminoles fought in its battles. When the Cherokee Council abolished slavery in February 1863, it acted as the Union was acting, and for a nation as divided as the Union itself. No telling of the nations' part in this war is honest that leaves this section out; and none is complete that leaves out §5, because the peace itself wrote the freed people's citizenship into treaties that are still being litigated in the nations' own courts and the courts of the United States.

5. The treaties of 1866 and the freedmen, to the present day

Documented Fact — the treaties. The United States treated all five nations as defeated belligerents — the loyal halves' service notwithstanding — and the Reconstruction Treaties of 1866 imposed land cessions on all of them and wrote emancipation and citizenship into law: the Seminole treaty (21 March 1866) gave people of African descent "all the rights of native citizens"; the Choctaw and Chickasaw treaty (28 April 1866) required those nations to adopt their freedmen within two years or forfeit $300,000 held in trust — the Chickasaw Nation never adopted them, and a 1904 decision of the United States Supreme Court held its freedmen had therefore never acquired citizenship; the Muscogee treaty (14 June 1866) gave the freedmen "an equal interest in the soil and national funds"; the Cherokee treaty (19 July 1866) declared that slavery should never again exist in the nation and guaranteed the freedmen "all the rights of native Cherokees." At the allotment era, the Dawes Commission enrolled the freedmen on separate rolls and recorded no blood degree for them — the paperwork decision that, a century later, would be used to read their descendants out of citizenship under "by blood" requirements.

Documented Fact — the question in the present courts. The United States Government Accountability Office's accounting of November 2025 (GAO-26-107118) states the present position nation by nation, and this entry carries it as the record's current tense, dated as it stands: freedmen descendants are eligible for citizenship in the Cherokee Nation — the federal court held in Cherokee Nation v. Nash (30 August 2017) that the 1866 treaty guarantees it, and in 2021 the Cherokee Nation's own Supreme Court ordered the words "by blood" struck from its constitution and laws, in an opinion whose words, as reported, call the exclusion what it was; freedmen descendants are eligible in the Seminole Nation on the GAO's summary, after generations of litigation; in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the nation's own Supreme Court held in July 2025 that the 1866 treaty guarantees the freedmen descendants' citizenship, and as of the GAO's accounting the enrolment of any descendant under that ruling remained an evolving, contested matter; in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, freedmen descendants are not eligible, the 1904 ruling's shadow still standing over the Chickasaw case. The freedmen descendants' own testimony — plaintiffs like Marilyn Vann, a Cherokee freedmen descendant whose name stands in the case captions of this fight — is a witness family in this record, and their argument is the treaty itself: the promise was made in 1866, in writing, to their ancestors, who had earned it in the column to Kansas and, in many families, on the Removal roads before that. The entry settles none of it; the courts of the nations and of the United States are still settling it, and the entry's date for the state of play is November 2025, the GAO's.

6. The weight of it

Estimate, flagged as such. The total of Native men who served in the war, both armies, is commonly estimated at about twenty thousand; the record gives no audited count, and this entry constructs none. What the documented particulars add up to needs no estimate: the war's first organised Black resistance to the Confederacy marched in Opothleyahola's column; the territory's largest battle was won by Home Guards and Black infantry together; the surrender that ended the eastern war was written out by a Seneca officer the republic had refused to let practise law; and the last general to surrender was a Cherokee slaveholder's-regiment commander whose name the Cherokee Nation still argues over. The nations fought that war one generation from their own removal, divided by wounds the removal had cut, and on both sides of a question — whether human beings could be held as property — on which some of their own houses stood on the wrong side. Their descendants, all of them — including the descendants of the people they enslaved, whose citizenship fight is this entry's living final section — are still working out what the war decided. That is the whole record. It is noted entire.

Sources for every claim in this reading stand in the research file behind this class. Its flagged points are carried openly: the Chusto-Talasah date stands in one secondary account as 19 December against the encyclopedia's 9 December; the exodus and Home Guard numbers are the standard estimates; the Appomattox exchange is carried as Parker's own recorded account; and the freedmen's present position is a moving record, dated November 2025. Cross-reference: Bannock and the Removal Roads — the roads these nations had walked a generation before the war. Companion classes in this band: The Code Talkers · They Signed On — The Long Service · Chewing Away at the Treaties · The Fight Goes On.

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