The cherokee diaspora, p.20
The Cherokee Diaspora, page 20
For most Cherokees, the Civil War was both disruptive and devastating. Given that approximately 400 Eastern Cherokee men (out of a total population of roughly 1,000) saw active duty during the war, it is not unreasonable to assume that virtually every Cherokee family in North Carolina lost loved ones, or had family members flee as refugees.103 The Civil War therefore put enormous strain on kinship networks, and the refugee experience for the North Carolina Cherokees produced discernible changes in social relationships and cultural patterns. For example, refugee slaves, now added to the families of Cherokees intermarried to either whites or blacks already living in Qualla townships, altered the complexion of Cherokee communities and forced kinship groups to innovate in the ways that traditional cultural beliefs and practices influenced the meaning and purpose of daily life.
Disease also had an impact on Cherokees living in North Carolina. In addition to seeing about 400 men go into military service during the war, the community lost approximately 300 members in a smallpox epidemic at the close of the war.104 Thomas sought medical assistance for the Cherokees, but the vaccine brought to western North Carolina proved ineffective. Thus, when Cherokee refugees did begin to return home, they found townships in ruin, kinship ties severed due to death, in battle or from disease, and a general sense of confusion, anger, and frustration.105 In the homeland in the Great Smoky Mountains, the American Civil War brought Cherokee society to its knees.
The multiple issues arising from wartime refugee experiences touched not only virtually every North Carolina Cherokee, but Cherokees throughout the diaspora. The social, cultural, and political issues that emerged among the Cherokees following the war were manifold. They included: loss of property; the desire to return “home;” the search for loved ones and kin; the destruction of basic infrastructure and agricultural land; the threat of death from illness and disease; and the need to care for children of different racial and ethnic backgrounds left orphaned and malnourished. With John Ross’s death and burial in Delaware in 1866 (his body was later exhumed and relocated back to the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory), the Cherokee people had to face these issues without the leader who had guided them for almost forty years.106
For Cherokees, whether they lived in western North Carolina, in the political homeland of the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory, or in diaspora on either side of the Mississippi, the legacy of the Civil War lived on well after the war ended.107 Civil War refugees, and the Cherokees who had lost kin during the war, posed one of the greatest challenges.108 In the decades following the war, both Cherokee and federal officials worked to rebuild Cherokee towns and to reestablish the legal status of Cherokees, whites, and former slaves within Cherokee communities.
SIX
The “Refugee Business”
The Civil War displaced millions of people. On both sides of the Mississippi River, whites, Native Americans, and African Americans found themselves thrust into uncertain futures. For black Americans, the unease was temporarily mollified by the thrill of winning their freedom with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. However, for tens of thousands of Native people, the Civil War represented the greatest threat to their existence as Indigenous Americans since the era of removal in the 1830s. Cherokee leaders understood this. They recognized that the post-war migrations of black and white Americans to the geographical center of the United States posed a serious demographic challenge to their nation, so recently vanquished in war. The Cherokee Nation was also significantly diminished in its territorial holdings—namely the Cherokee Strip and the Cherokee Neutral Lands in Kansas—due to the treaty terms that Cherokee leaders grudgingly agreed to with the United States in 1866.1
This loss of land was a critical blow to the political homeland of the Cherokee diaspora. Prior to the war, a relatively clear geographical pattern was emerging in the distribution of Cherokees living in diaspora. Politically, the center of Cherokee power shifted west, to the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory. This became the political homeland, with Cherokees residing in Indian Territory and in the nearby states of Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas. Slightly farther afield, a smattering of Cherokees resided in the mountain West and western states and territories such as Arizona. East of the Mississippi, Cherokees lived in Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and western North Carolina. Finally, long-distance migrations saw people of Cherokee descent travel vast distances during the nineteenth century and reside in, for example, Virginia, Washington, DC, Connecticut, and New York along the Atlantic seaboard of the United States, and in California and Hawaii to the west. For the well-educated, wealthy, and politically ambitious Cherokees living far from the political homeland of the Cherokee diaspora in Indian Territory and the pre-removal homeland in the Woodland South, mobility became one of the hallmarks of a diasporic Cherokee identity during the late nineteenth century. But with Cherokee landholdings, particularly those in Indian Territory, once again under attack from the colonial forces of the United States and its citizens, the stable physical basis for the concept of Cherokee political and ancestral homelands came into question. Cherokees throughout the diaspora and in the homelands in the cis- and trans-Mississippi found themselves caught between the trauma of the past and the uncertainty of the future.
In the West, Cherokee leaders greeted the post-Civil War developments with a mixture of hope and trepidation. Their anxiety was stirred by wave after wave of “homesteaders,” “sooners,” and “boomers,” predominantly white migrants who carried aspirations of building a life for themselves and their families on the “Unassigned Lands” of Indian Territory. The Unassigned Lands became part of Oklahoma Territory and were located to the south of the Cherokee Strip. While Elias C. Boudinot, a Cherokee lawyer, brokered the terms upon which the Unassigned Lands became part of Oklahoma Territory, the catalyst for the westward migration of “homesteaders” had occurred while the American Civil War still raged.2
In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act.3 This federal legislation provided what most Americans saw as an invitation to settle the West. And settle they did, throughout the last four decades of the nineteenth century. A kaleidoscope of people—Northern and Southern whites, freedpeople, and wartime refuges of every race, religion, and ethnic background—went west after the Civil War. And the Cherokee Nation, the political homeland to a diasporic people, was right at the center of this movement of human beings. By 1885, 25, 000 white people called the Cherokee Nation “home.” Five years later, that number had increased to 140, 000.4 Cherokee officials thus felt their Nation was under siege.5 It was in this context that Cherokee, African Cherokee, and African American refugees of war struggled to survive, return “home,” and rebuild family and community networks torn asunder by the war. In the decades between the end of the Civil War and the passage of the Dawes and Curtis Acts, in 1887 and 1898 respectively, Cherokee leaders on both sides of the Mississippi found themselves struggling to determine who was and was not Cherokee. As detailed in this chapter (and the chapter to follow), the question of Cherokee identity was no small matter in the late nineteenth century, for it touched on the economics, politics, and cultural connectedness of Cherokee people throughout the diaspora and in their respective homelands. Indeed, racial concepts of “blood,” social status, and migration all became intertwined in the political and legal battles to define Cherokee citizenship (and identity more broadly) during the late nineteenth century. In the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War the prominent Cherokee leader W. P. Adair gave questions related to identity, social status, “blood,” and migration in the trans-Mississippi a name: “the refugee business.”6
Post-War Realignments
Adair’s pithy description of the enduring social and economic problems caused by wartime refugees in and around Indian Territory belied the complexity and scope of the problem confronting Cherokee officials. The post-war principal chiefs—William Potter Ross (1866–1867 and 1872–1875), Lewis Downing (1867–1872), Charles Thompson (1875–1879), Dennis Bushyhead (1879–1888), and Joel B. Mayes (1888–1891)—all found their administrations struggling to meet the challenges of the “refugee business” as they simultaneously worked to rally Cherokees around ideals of national unity and social harmony. With the “the havoc of war” fresh in every Cherokee’s memory, Princeton-educated William Potter Ross urged Cherokees to once again “become one people.” However, with overlapping waves of white, black, and Native American refugees and migrants assailing the land and resources of the Cherokee Nation, such unity was going to prove difficult to achieve.7
Ross believed that it was vital for the Cherokee National Council to put aside old factional differences in order to effectively meet the challenges being posed to them in Indian Territory. These challenges included large refugee populations, aggressive railroad corporations—who were clamoring to slice rail lines through the Cherokee Nation, thereby opening it to more non-Cherokee “intruders”—and a diverse ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic mix of migrants heading west with dreams of starting a new life.8 In their efforts to minister to the needs of wartime refugees, and to exclude “intruders” with no rights to settle on Cherokee lands, the National Council’s first important task was to define the legal grounds upon which one might claim a Cherokee identity.
After the Civil War, post-war politics, the loss of land in the treaty of 1866, migration, re-settlement, intermarriage, and cultural exchange all complicated the “traditional” parameters for what it meant to be Cherokee.9 Cherokee leaders were left with the challenge of finding the right formula of laws and public policy to ensure that anyone with a genuine claim to Cherokee identity would not be unfairly or arbitrarily excluded from the “Cherokee family.” For example, how was the Cherokee National Council to understand Cherokee identity in the cis-Mississippi following the federal government’s recognition of the Eastern Cherokees’ separate tribal status in 1868 (and their subsequent legal efforts to clarify the basis for land title at the Qualla Reservation in 1894)?10 Would Cherokee laws make it possible for people to travel and visit friends or kin in either the trans-Mississippi or cis-Mississippi worlds? How were Cherokees, many thousands made refugees by the Civil War, to reconstitute the frayed and, in some cases, severed, family and kinship ties that not only defined Cherokee identity but were also vital to the economic health of their communities? Was it even possible to repair kinship ties as Cherokees struggled just to sustain life in the refugee camps of southern Kansas and Missouri? At war’s end, nothing was certain.
What was certain was that after the war the Cherokee remained a literate people. While English was the primary language for most Cherokees in the late nineteenth century—and the language of instruction in the Cherokee public schools and seminaries—Sequoyah’s syllabary continued to instill a sense of cultural pride. Cherokee “traditionalists” in both North Carolina and Indian Territory kept the Cherokee language alive, just as they kept traditional cultural beliefs and practices meaningful in Cherokee life through contemporary interpretations. More importantly for a diasporic people, Cherokees maintained a connection to their Indigenous identity by developing a rich epistolary tradition and culture of written storytelling (kanohesgi or kanohesginu, which refers to historical storytelling). Writing became a means for Cherokees to record ancient traditions, define political identities, argue legal cases, craft their own histories, and maintain connections with Cherokee people throughout the diaspora. Writing from California, John Rollin Ridge observed that a “prodigious memory” went into Native storytelling, as evidenced by the fact that an Indian chief could recount “the history and main features of all the treaties, French, English, and American.”11
In the wake of the Civil War, literacy and interpretive skills helped Cherokee political leaders to define Cherokee citizenship and defend the Cherokee Nation’s sovereignty in Indian Territory. For individuals, literacy skills, a good grasp of Cherokee laws, and clear recollections of family genealogy all played an important part in nurturing family and kinship ties, and by extension, their Cherokee identity.
On both sides of the Mississippi, however, the years immediately after the war were characterized by disease, death, and displacement. These were not ideal circumstances in which to reconnect severed kinship ties or nurture Cherokee identities. Federal reports offer glimpses of just how bad the situation was for Cherokee and freedmen refugees when they tell of guerrilla fighters (or “bushwhackers”), Ku Klux Klansmen, and western outlaws adding to the social instability of Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and Indian Territory.12 Despite a joint resolution passed by the United States Congress in April 1867 appropriating funds “to prevent starvation and extreme want” among vulnerable refugees in the South and Southwest, the federal government’s response to the poverty among postwar refugees proved inadequate.13 As a result, philanthropists such as the Quaker Elizabeth Comstock administered to the needs of African American and Native American refugees in the West, while Cherokees in the cis-Mississippi were left to weigh the risks and benefits of remaining on their ancient homelands or heading west in the hope of reestablishing kinship bonds in the Cherokee Nation.14
Land was vitally important to Cherokees who hoped to rebuild their homes and provide for families, either at the Qualla Reservation in North Carolina or in the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory. Holding onto that land, however, proved a difficult task in the postbellum decades. As a result, genealogy, or the rhetoric of “blood,” became increasingly important to Cherokee identity.15 In particular, “blood” and proof of a longstanding territorial connection to either the “Old Nation” prior to removal or the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory became important factors in the official determination of the right to legally call oneself Cherokee.16
Legal claims to Cherokee citizenship occurred as old political factions in the Cherokee Nation began a series of political realignments following John Ross’s death in 1866.17 For example, the Downing (or “Union”) Party attracted to its ranks a large constituency of “full-blood” subsistence farmers, who helped the party dominate Cherokee politics in the post-war decades. Its opponents, the National Party, included well-known Cherokees such as Dennis Bushyhead and William Potter Ross. Significantly, politics in the Cherokee Nation during the late nineteenth century was often punctuated with racial and cultural divisions between “full-bloods” (most gravitating toward the Downing Party) and “half-breeds,” (the vast majority filling the ranks of the National Party).18
Lewis Downing (Lewi-za-wau-na-skie) understood the vital importance of political stability within the Cherokee Nation. He witnessed post-war political realignments from his position as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1866 and between 1867 and 1872. Downing was born in eastern Tennessee in 1823, of mixed racial ancestry. His mother, Susan Daugherty, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant, Cornelius Daugherty, and a Cherokee mother. Lewis’s father, Samuel Downing, was also a so-called mixed-blood, the son of Major John Downing and his Cherokee wife. Lewis Downing migrated west in 1839, accompanying the Baptist missionary Evan Jones and the Cherokee minister Jesse Bushyhead. Downing eventually became a Baptist minister and maintained an active role in Cherokee social and political life in the decades leading up to the Civil War.19 With the war over, and Downing occupying the position of principal chief, he knew better than most that wartime refugees, settlers, and Cherokees returning “home” would place enormous pressures on the Cherokee Nation’s meager resources. He was also aware of the lurking threats just beyond the Cherokee Nation’s borders, namely warfare across the Plains, the growth in white support for a territorial government in the western territories, and the movement of whites, African Americans, and non-Cherokee natives toward the Cherokee Nation.20
In a November 1868 letter to Anderson Sarcoxie, the assistant chief of the Delaware Indians, Downing warned that the Delaware should not attempt to migrate west of longitude 96 degrees. Even before their relocation beyond the Mississippi in 1838 and 1839, the Cherokee had a special relationship with the Delaware, seeing them as the “grandfathers of all the Indians.”21 Now, in the post-Civil War context, the Cherokee Nation had signed an agreement with the Delaware in 1867 in which the Cherokee Nation agreed to receive those Indians removed from Kansas by the federal government. While the relationship between the Delaware and Cherokee was often characterized by “bitterness,” in the late 1860s Downing insisted that the Delaware and the Cherokee must focus their combined energy on creating a political sanctuary—a homeland—for all “Red people,” not just Cherokees.22 Reports that the federal army was committing atrocities against the Plains Indians—atrocities that included dismemberment and the use of hot irons “thrust through testicles or the anus”—certainly reached Native American leaders in Indian Territory during the late 1860s and 1870s, making Downing’s concept of sanctuary all the more important.23
Similarly, Native leaders were conscious of the racial attitudes of men like James Farmer, who served in the US Army’s Indian Service and wrote that “We on the frontier considered a dead Indian as a good Indian.”24 Downing, a brilliant and perceptive leader, did not turn a blind eye to the racist-inspired violence across the Plains and on the frontier.25 As he explained to Sarcoxie:
