Negro History Bulletin, Jan-Dec 2001 p9(10)
Tracing trails of blood on ice: commemorating "the Great Escape"
in 1861-62 of Indians and Blacks into Kansas. Willard B.
Johnson.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Association for the Study of
Afro-American Life and History, Inc.
My heart raced and emotions surged before I consciously grasped
the meaning of what I was reading in that footnote. Reading all the
footnotes had become routine for me, because ages ago I learned that
important information about my people and my interests would more
often than not be buried there, if mentioned at all. But, here was
something really startling to me--mention of Humboldt, Kansas. That
tiny southeast Kansas town had been the lifelong hometown of my
grandmother, Gertrude Stovall (who was 101 years old when she died
in 1990), and it is where I plan to be buried, amidst five previous
generations of my mother's family. Here it was being specifically
proposed as the place for an event that, had it occurred, might very
significantly have impacted if not altered American history during
the Civil War.
The footnote quoted a letter to President Lincoln from emissaries
of Opothleyahola, a legendary leader of the traditionalist faction
of the Muskogee Indians (whom the whites called "Creeks"). I had
come to focus on this leader in my quest to understand the famous
"Trails of Tears" over which almost all of the Indians of the
southeastern states had trekked when they were forced out of their
traditional homeland to "Indian Territory" (now Oklahoma). (1)
In the letter, the Native American leader was proposing to
convene all the mid-western Indian tribes in a gigantic General
Council meeting, to demonstrate their continued loyalty to the Union
and to secure enforcement of the treaties that his people had signed
with the United States government decades before. Now they needed to
meet to make good on those pledges. Of all places, Opothleyahola
proposed to hold that meeting in Humboldt! (2)
In
researching the story behind this note, I was able to tie together
many disjointed strands of family and folk history. The answers to
questions such as why it was that so much of the black family
folklore of this region spoke so vaguely of having Indian
connections; how it was that some of our black families seemed to
have been among the first settlers in that area of Kansas; how it
was that some spoke of having come through Indian Territory; and why
and how it was that after the Civil War so many black families
returned to or stayed in Indian Territory became more clear.
Understanding the connections between African Americans and
Native Americans is difficult and sometimes painful because these
connections were quite complex and ranged from marriage,
brotherhood, and adoption into families, to Indian enslavement of
blacks. (3) That many African Americans had shared the suffering of
Native Americans on the Trail of Tears had come to my attention
through the writings of a family friend, former Cherokee principal
chief, Ms. Wilma Mankiller. (4) Many of the blacks who were forcibly
relocated with the Indians were natural or adopted family members,
or incorporated communities, but perhaps as many as four thousand of
them had been slaves. (5) They shared all the ordeals of the
removals. (6)
Chief Mankiller had pointed out that the role of blacks in this
story was not widely known and had never been prominently
commemorated. That prompted me to attempt to correct this fault by
proposing such a commemoration to the Kansas Institute for African
American and Native American Family History (KIAANAFH), which I had
founded in 1991, in part to honor the memory of my Grandmother
Stovall, to preserve and use her rich collection of stories and
memorabilia and that of other long-established families in the area,
and to better understand and teach the history of the African
American pioneers in Kansas. (7)
Many of us in the Institute were Kansas-connected African
American educators and religious leaders who had heard mention of
Indian connections and long marches in our own family folklore, but
we knew no details. The ordeals blacks had shared with Indians, just
as those of slavery itself, became muted in if not dropped from, the
conversation of our people as they attempted to forget the past and
look resolutely forward to better days. In our day they still speak
only vaguely of their Indian ties. We wondered if we could flesh out
and document these stories and understand their significance, and
determine if they would provide the framework for a suitable
commemoration.
We found many families totally unaware that their connection to
Indians could possibly have been through enslavement to them. The
fact of Indians as slaveholders is not very evident in any popular
understanding of American history. Although perhaps no more than ten
percent of the households of the Five Civilized Tribes ever owned
any slaves, they profoundly affected the fate of both the Native
Americans and African Americans in the South and the Midwest. (8)
The institution of black slavery among some of the Indian
societies differed a bit from that among whites. For example, some
of the blacks who had experienced the earlier Upper Creek removals
traveled in parties with no Indian supervisors, yet did not attempt
to escape on the way or after arrival--evidence that their
experience of "slavery" among the Creeks was far different from that
they would have known in the Southern slaveocracy or perhaps even
among the Cherokee. (9)
The history of these tribes was also powerfully affected by the
commitment of members of the secret Cherokee "Keetoowah society,"
who vehemently opposed assimilation of many aspects of
European-American culture, and extended that to include slavery.
Thus, even the slavery connection between blacks and Indians was a
complex one. (10)
There is some controversy about how and why, in the end, both
those who had accepted the removals (the "Treaty Party") and their
adversaries among Chief John Ross's faction of the Cherokees, as
well as the leadership of the "Lower Creeks," decided to join the
Confederacy during the Civil War. (11) It would have been hard for
the Indians to defend their territory once they were surrounded on
three sides by Confederate states--Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana and
Texas. Even the "Indian Agents" sent by the government in Washington
to work among the Indians, were often secret advocates of the
Confederacy who played on Indian fears by arguing that the Union
could not protect them, and that most of the money for the annuities
that Washington had pledged to these nations in return for
relinquishing their former lands were actually backed by bonds of
the Southern states, and thus would be worthless promises from the
Union. So for personal, political and economic reasons most of the
Indian leadership, except for Opothleyahola, felt that the safer bet
was with the South! (12)
Like John Ross, Opothleyahola had owned slaves and was a major
trader and plantation owner, even after the resettlement in Indian
Territory. Also like Ross, he had resisted removal of the Indian
nations from their traditional homelands to territory West of the
Mississippi, but had then seen it as the only way to get free of
white encroachment. But, more importantly, he was a vehement enemy
of assimilationist Creek "half breed" leaders from the more mixed
Lower Creeks. Indeed he played a direct role in provoking, if not
carrying out a Creek Council death sentence on one of the earliest
of the Lower Creek leaders, the elder Chief William McIntosh, who
illegally sold Creek lands to encroaching whites, and whose
descendants never forgot or forgave the execution. The McIntosh clan
led the Creek removal to Indian Territory, and with slave labor as a
foundation, reestablished themselves as rich and dominant political
leadership there. (13)
Once in Indian Territory, and with the continued encroachment of
whites from the slave states, Opothleyahola attempted to rally the
more "pure blood" elements of his own Creek people and the Cherokees
to remain neutral--if not loyal to the Union--in the war. (14) He
tried many ways to resist the continued encroachment of whites and
the supplications of the Confederacy. (15)
Finally, he sent emissaries to Kansas with letters to President
Lincoln in an attempt to extract protection and support from
Washington. One of these letters proposed to regroup all the loyal
Indian leadership in the meeting to take place in Humboldt. (16) But
time ran out, and events overtook him. When John Ross, Chief of the
largest of the tribes, finally gave in to pressures to side with the
Confederacy, Opothleyahola felt there was no hope for Indian
autonomy and cultural survival in the new territory. He planned to
flee.
Opothleyahola rallied some 9,000 people, mostly his own Creeks
along with a substantial number of Shawnees and Seminoles, and
hundreds of blacks (17) (generally males of warrior age to whom he
had promised freedom in return for their help), in this desperate
break for Kansas, the nearest free state. (18) Their plans were
discovered and Native American Confederate loyalists, troops of the
Confederate General Douglas Cooper, and even units of Texas Rangers
chased them down. The pursuers included Stan Watie, a Cherokee now
made an officer in the Confederate army, and Lt. Colonels Daniel and
David McIntosh, sons of the slain Chief McIntosh, who had personal
scores to settle. (19)
In three major battles nearly a third of the
fleeing Indians and many of the blacks were killed. Opothleyahola's
followers rather miraculously "won" two of these battles despite
being seriously outnumbered. In the first conflict, they got away by
subterfuge and stealth. They fooled the pursuing Confederate rebels
into thinking that fires they left burning marked their camp, but
they had slipped away during the night. Their victory in a second
battle was aided by the desertion to their side of the bulk of the
Cherokee soldiers who had been sent to fight them under the
Confederate army banner, but who were secretly members of the
Keetoowah Society. (20)
In the final onslaught, however, they were routed, and the
survivors were scattered without clothing, conveyance, or food. In
one of the coldest winters on record, the fleeing refugees died by
the hundreds from brutal attack, exposure, exhaustion and hunger.
They left corpses and trails of blood from Indian Territory to
Kansas, over many miles of ice-covered barren prairie and the frozen
banks of the Fall,Verdigris and Neosho river basins.
When in January of 1862, the bedraggled remnants, including
Opothleyahola himself and his family, finally reached their Kansas
destinations, the help they had expected from Union forces was
nonexistent. President Lincoln's indecisiveness about waging all-out
war and utilizing colored troops and timid Indian agents, who were
fearful to venture personally into territory subject to Confederate
patrols, to bring help and protection directly to "The Loyal
Indians," had delayed the provision of food, clothing and shelter,
as well as arms and munitions. Soon thereafter Opothleyahola's
daughter died of pneumonia and his own death followed within a year.
They were both buried side by side near Ft. Belmont in what is now
Woodson County, and not very far from Humboldt.
As early as April of 1862, perhaps because of the prodding of
embarrassed Indian agents including William P. Dole, the
commissioner, and the leadership of Kansas politicians such as U.S.
Senator-made-General James Lane, substantial numbers of the Native
American and African American male refugees were permitted to join
the Union army. These recruits provided the core of the First Indian
Home Guard and the First and Second Kansas Colored Regiments.
These units were actually the first colored soldiers to engage in
armed battle on the Union side in the Civil War--preceding the more
recognized Massachusetts 54th. Ultimately, they won crucially
important battles, including ones at Cabin Creek and Honey Springs,
that kept the supply routes open for the Union troops at Fort Gibson
in Indian Territory, led to the recapture of Fort Smith in Arkansas,
and helped to sustain the pincer pressure on Little Rock, Arkansas.
The success of each of which were important factors in the defeat of
the Confederacy in the western areas. (21)
Opothleyahola's promise of freedom to all those blacks that
joined in the escape to Kansas (mostly men of warrior age) was kept
during the brief time of his remaining life, and after his death, by
the successor Creek leaders. In discussions in Kansas in 1863, they
drafted a new treaty that acknowledged "the necessity, justice, and
humanity" of the Emancipation Proclamation, and promised to provide
land for their freedmen "and all others of the African race who
shall be permitted to settle among them." (22)
This was in keeping with the action by the Seminole leadership
decades earlier, who in the negotiations to settle the Seminole wars
and to arrange for that tribe's removal to Indian Territory, refused
to allow the U.S. officials to separate the Indian and the African
components of the tribe. Ironically, some of the same black
interpreters participated in each of the discussions which provided
for citizenship rights to the blacks. (23)
The 1863 Creek treaty, which was subsequently rejected by the
Creeks because it had been amended by the U.S. Congress, occurred
about the same time as a resolution was passed by the Cherokee
National Council, likely influenced by Keetoowah members, to abolish
slavery and promise full citizenship in these Indian Nations to the
freedmen.
I had heard vague stories in my youth that not only my own, but
several of the early African American families to settle in the
Humboldt area had Indian connections, and had involved lost land,
perhaps oil revenue and other rights. Such stories were not unusual
among the African American families with whom we in the KIAANAFH
were working. Could these stories be fleshed out and documented? I
remembered hearing of my grandmother's legal inquiries about rights
that might still be due her through her grandfather Charley Davis,
who had been born in the late 1840s in Tahlequah, the Cherokee
Capital in Indian Territory, and whose Kern-Clifton Cherokee roll
number she had carefully preserved. She had been told only that
"time had run out for such claims."
After my grandmother's death, when I started to research that
dimension of our family history, I was as surprised as anyone to
find that the roll was only for freedmen. Did he have any blood tie?
There was no information passed down about that, and it seems he
never claimed one. His Freedman connection had produced a payment in
the 1890s of considerable importance to his family, but he died soon
thereafter before it was renewed or extended to his children. It was
not easy to pursue his genealogy, but with the help of staff at the
National Archives in Washington D.C., I was finally able to copy his
affidavit that, backed by three witnesses, named his owner. I have
since discovered much about that owner, but so far I have yet to
document Davis's life before Humboldt. We are not even sure exactly
when and how he came to Humboldt. Perhaps he had no direct
connection with the Great Escape. But it seemed likely that some
black families did.
I wondered if the Great Escape story would throw light on the
more general pattern of the coming of the first black families into
Southeast Kansas area. Could these families have come in the Escape
itself, or its immediate aftermath? How could we piece together a
plausible answer to such questions?
In pursuit of information about my own ancestors I was struck by
several features of the 1860 federal census rolls for Arkansas,
which includes the schedules for Indian Territory. Most notably,
nearly all the Creek Indians were listed as "Black." Would that
designation have today's significance?
I had read about extensive African and Creek mixing. After all,
it was probably to the Creeks that blacks had escaped as early as
1526 from L. Vasquez deAyllon's shipwrecked settlement on the
Carolina coast. I had read about the ancient Creek migrations from
the Southwest, where the indigenous populations were considerably
darker than the Cherokee and other Iroquoian speaking peoples of the
East, and may have mixed with Africans during early Spanish
exploration and colonial times, as seems evident among Mexican
populations, and some say even well before that! But could such
mixing have been so extensive as to affect the majority of the
Creeks? (24)
I began to suspect these particular white census enumerators
impulsively listed persons of dark complexion simply as "black."
This would not necessarily reflect the standard "one-drop" American
practice and imply "African." Moreover, many of the dark Creek
Indians have very straight hair, so I became skeptical.
Another interesting feature of the census for Indian Territory
was the special note by the enumerator that the Seminoles refused
ever to allow a listing of "slaves"; it seemed to be a reaffirmation
of the earlier removal-treaty negotiation experience. However, the
Seminoles, whose Nation arose out of a significant social,
political, and genetic integration of persons of Native American and
African American background, were not all listed as "black." Perhaps
the color designations for the Creeks were valid clues to their
identity after all.
The key breakthrough in this genetic conundrum came with an
examination of an adjutant general's descriptive record of the First
Indian Home Guard Regiment, where color designations were quite
nuanced. Seven variations were used, from "light," to "Indian,"
through "red" and "copper" to "black" and "Negro" and even
"African." The majority did not fall on the darker end of this
range, but I did count about fifty persons in the last three
categories.
Most importantly for me, this group included a Daniel Landrum,
whose color was described as "Negro." I knew we had Landrums in my
own extended family, and they had hailed from Neosho Falls, one of
the towns where the refugees in the Great Escape had encamped. So, I
went back to the state census records for the Woodson and Allen
County areas in 1865, the earliest full record that would have been
taken after the Great Escape. Lo and behold, there were scores of
"black" persons having come from "the Creek Nation," or "the
Seminole Nation," or other parts of "Indian Territory." They must
have come on the Escape, or immediately in its aftermath, because
they were not in the 1860 federal census for the Kansas territory.
Among them were surnames I knew from personal experience to include
African American families--Crosslin, Grubbs, Jackson, Perryman,
Ross, Vann.
Several families, living close to each other in Neosho Falls were
enumerated as "Landam," which is not a name I could find in the
standard lists of Cherokee or Creek freedmen, but Landrum does show
up in them. One Benjamin Franklin Landrum, a Cherokee slaveholder,
had achieved some notoriety for having taught his slaves to read.
(25) I was very excited to find that Daniel Landrum had enrolled in
the Indian Guards at Leroy, a town near Neosho Falls. He rather
quickly deserted from the Indian Guards, but appears to have
enlisted soon thereafter in Company C of the Second Kansas Colored
Regiment, where he became a petty officer. Maybe this was one of
Benjamin Landrum's former slaves who could read, and perhaps that
capacity was more appreciated in the Colored Regiment than in the
Indian Guard. Who knows? (26)
There was also a Jackson in the Guards and Jacksons living among
Landrums as listed in the 1870 federal census, when there were still
several branches of Landrums in Neosho Falls. Some included first
names--a Franklin and a Benjamin--that show up a decade later among
my Landrum family connection (by chance?). The Landrums had married
Jacksons. The records are not detailed enough for a definitive
conclusion, but it seems very likely that these are branches of the
same families.
I once again looked at the records regarding the pioneer black
families of Humboldt. Several of those already there in the early
1860s had been born in Indian Territory, were enumerated as Indians,
or were married to Native Americans. One of the most interesting was
"Aunt Polly" Crosslin (later known as Crosby), in whose cabin the
town's "Colored Church," the Poplar Grove Baptist Church, was later
founded (in the late 1870s). That church has been the heart of
Humboldt's community of blacks and Indians ever since. She was one
of the earliest African Americans to settle in the town, was married
to an interpreter for the Seminoles, and is reputed to have been a
Cherokee freedman from Florida or Alabama. She, like others in the
town, is reported to have harbored escaping slaves in her cabin,
which had a trap door over a tunnel that ran to the nearby river
bluffs. (27)
It had become evident that several of the
pioneer black families in the Humboldt area indeed had Indian
connections and at least some of them, including distant branches of
my own family, most likely did come into area as part of the drama
of the Escape. Some of these families stayed. Others may have
returned to Indian Territory. What difference did the Escape episode
make in their subsequent life?
The 1866 treaties that settled the Civil War between the U.S.
Government and the rebel tribes, especially with the Cherokees and
Creeks, renewed and institutionalized the promises that had been
made in 1863 as a result of the experience of the Escape and its
aftermath. This included some citizenship rights in the Native
American nations for those freedmen who were in these territories at
the end of the war, or who returned there within six months. Such
rights included allotments of land, sharing in the annuity payments,
and access to services. Sometimes they included voting and office
holding rights. There were many problems and obstacles for the
freedmen to overcome in securing the implementation of these
provisions, and some who would have qualified were never able to
benefit. The tribes varied greatly in applying the provisions of
these treaties. The Creeks complied most fully, but the Chickasaws
never honored them. Maybe some of the Indian freedmen stayed in
Kansas because of these difficulties. Upon their mustering out,
however, many of the black soldiers returned to the territories of
their respective Indian nations. A great many of the former slave
families that had gone into hiding or had camped at Fort Gibson and
other Union-controlled forts followed suit.
Despite many later disputes over the accuracy of the rolls taken
to allocate the land and annuity payments to the blacks, especially
in the Cherokee and Creek nations, a very substantial number of them
did get land, annuity payments, and a capital base in Indian
Territory. One prominent family that exemplifies what that meant for
their subsequent development is the family of the noted historian
John Hope Franklin, whose great-grandfather had married a Choctaw,
and who became a substantial rancher on land acquired through his
Native American and African American freedmen connections. (28)
In the context of the current crescendo of calls for reparations
to African Americans, it is important to note that these treaties
contained the provisions that actually led to the earliest
substantial public compensation that African Americans got
explicitly in recognition of their ordeal of slavery in the United
States.
Despite the famous promises voiced in conjunction with the
federal government's Freedmen's Bureau, but never passed for an
allotment to freedmen of "forty acres and a mule," such black
landowning as did ultimately develop in the South did not result
from such promises of reparations. Amnesty provisions granted by
President Andrew Johnson to recanting former rebels resulted in the
return of most "confiscated and abandoned" lands to the former
slaveholders, and the forced removal of many blacks who had taken
control, if not registered ownership, of such lands for farming and
husbandry. (29)
Excited by our discovery of these possible special connections
with an all-too-obscure American epic, The Kansas Institute helped
to organize the first-ever celebration of the role that African
Americans as well as the town of Humboldt had played in the Great
Escape saga. The ceremony was part of "The Humboldt Historic
Days-2000" observance sponsored by the town's Chamber of Commerce.
That event is held tri-annually in remembrance of the sacking of the
town in September and October of 1861 by Confederate troops,
ostensibly in reprisal for the anti-slavery activity of many of its
citizens. Descendants participated in a candlelight procession in
remembrance of the pioneer African Americans who came to the
Humboldt area from Indian Territory.
Of course, one such family featured in this ceremony was that of
Daniel Landrum. Special note was made of the presence in the
audience of KIAANAFH member Mrs. Eva Franklin, 90-year-old
descendant of one of the Jacksons, and of a family that is kin by
marriage to and was raised by Landrum descendants. Her niece and
KIAANAFH Board member, Mrs. Charlotte Goodseal, commemorated the
Landrums in the procession. James Boyd, present-day owner of the
property where Aunt Polly's cabin had been located, carried her
candle in the ceremony and proudly displayed the iron fireplace
shovel she had used in her famous cooking. Seven other pioneer black
families, several still with descendants in the area, were also
honored. (30)
The program also included spokespersons for the Native American
peoples most directly associated with these stories, most
particularly the current principal chief of the Muskogee (Creek)
nation, Mr. Perry Beaver, who is a distant descendant of
Opothleyahola. Two direct descendants, Felix and Thompson Gouge, who
now reside in Oklahoma City, represented the family in the
candlelight procession. Although there is no evidence that Sequoyah,
inventor of the Cherokee writing system, or members of his family
had joined the Escape, the participation of a great granddaughter,
Mrs. Mary Atkin, symbolized the crucial assistance given to the
Escape by the many Cherokee warriors from the Keetoowah Society.
Everybody, Indian, black and white, pledged together "to seek all
the ways possible to alleviate the legacy of racism, slavery and
human injustice in our land," a goal obviously still far from being
accomplished. Their attentive faces seemed to reflect proud
recognition of a shared and fateful connection to one of the
country's most gripping sagas of resistance, survival and ultimate
triumph. (31)
Perhaps the ceremony's participants and audience also wondered,
as I did, how different the history of these relationships might
have been had Opothleyahola succeeded to convene on Humboldt's
Neosho riverbank bluffs his requested "Grand Council of all the
tribes"--to pledge their "loyalty" to the Union, and to enforce the
earlier treaties. Would President Lincoln have been able or willing
to defend the sovereignty (the neutrality?) of these factious and
slaveholding tribes? No doubt, the tribes would have had to renounce
slavery, but would they have granted citizenship to the freedmen?
Would even the debate of the issue have moved Lincoln more quickly
to use colored troops, and equally as important, draft or at least
announce his Emancipation Proclamation much earlier? Would the
slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes have come subsequently to share
Indian land and annuity rights, or like the Africans in the
rebelling states, would they have been considered simply as the
federal government's wards, dependent on the ultimately unfulfilled
promises of the Freedmen's Bureau? Would the many all-black towns
have emerged in Indian Territory--derived from enclaves of landed
and self-reliant, if marginalized, black Indians, or would these
have been located in Kansas instead? Would Blacks and Indians alike
have nurtured memories of their many shared ordeals, or let them
sink even further into the shadows of their historical amnesia?
NOTES
(1) Annie Helloise Abel, The American Indian as Slaveholder and
Secessionist, with an Introduction by Theda Purdue and Michael D.
Green (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992):
242-47 and note 489.
(2) Quoted in Ibid., note 491.
(3) See J. Leitch Wright, Jr., Creeks and Seminoles, (Lincoln and
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986): 73ff, for detailed and
informed discussion of the extensive and long-lasting mixing of
Africans especially with the Creek speaking peoples (the
Muscogulges); Able, The American Indian as Slaveholder and
Secessionist, 23, note 14.
(4) Wilma Mankiller, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People, (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1993): 94.
(5) Estimates vary on this point. William Loren Katz, Black
Indians: A Hidden Heritage, (New York: Athenaeum, 1986): 138. Katz
suggests that, not counting the Seminoles (who may have used the
term to protect family members), these tribes still had over 5000
slaves in 1860.
(6) John Ehle, Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee
Nation, (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1988): 361. For
characterization of the impact of removal see Abel, The American
Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist, 20-21; Russell Thornton,
American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since
1492, (Normal: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987):76; Russell
Thornton, The Cherokees: A Population History. (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1990), passim; and Katz, Black Indians, 138.
(7) Mankiller, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People, 94.
(8) KIAANAFH: Round Table on The African American--Native
American Connection., 11 July 1998, transcript, Kansas City, (c/o
Willard R. Johnson MIT E53-367 Cambridge, MA 02139).
(9) Daniel F. Littlefied, Jr., Africans and Creeks: From the
Colonial Period to the Civil War, (Westport CT: Greenwood Press,
1979): loc. cit. Cf. Rudi Halliburton, Red Over Black: Black Slavery
among the Cherokee Indians, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977) for a
"non-romanticized" assessment of slavery among the Cherokees. For
more balanced views see Abel, The American Indian as Slaveholder and
Secessionist, passim, and articles by editor and by Patrick Minges
in the Bulletin of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical
Society, (Spring 1999).
(10) Patrick Minges, "Are You Kituwah's Son?: Cherokee
Nationalism and the Civil War," Paper presented at the American
Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Philadelphia Pennsylvania,
November, 1995, passim.
(11) "Treaty Party" refers to the few Cherokee leaders who, in
1834, accepted plans of President Jackson (but a project since the
Jefferson Presidency) for a treaty to provide for the transfer to
whites of Native American traditional lands for payments and
territory further west. The term "Lower Creeks" was used by whites
and had no traditional significance. See Ehle, Trail of Tears: The
Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation, 259-92.
(12) Abel, The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist,
chapter iv.
(13) Littlefield, Africans and Creeks, 116-29.
(14) Abel, The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist,
140, note, cites remarks by Confederate agent Albert Pike that
"Opothleyahola ... was not loyal: he feared the McIntoshes, who had
raised troops, and who, he thought, meant to kill him for killing
their father. He told me that he did not wish to fight against the
Southern States, but only that the Indians should all act together."
These were self-serving remarks by Pike who was supposed to recruit
the Indians to the Confederacy.
(15) Christine Schultz White, and Benton R. White, Now the Wolf
Has Come: The Creek Nation in the Civil War, (College Station: Texas
A&M University Press, 1996): passim.
(16) See Ibid.; review of Now the Wolf Has Come by Daryl Morrison
in Kansas History, 19:3 (Autumn 1996), and Abel, The American Indian
as Slaveholder and Secessionist, 244 and 247k.
(17) Figures vary from source to source. See KHS - Kansas
Historical Society files of archeologist Randy Thies: "Collections
Relating to Tri-County Area of Greenwood, Elk, and Wilson Counties"
by Ronald B. Ellis (1985); Patrick Minges (November 1995): 20, who
says Opothleyahola's forces included "700 armed blacks"; Edwin C.
Bears's "The Civil War Comes to Indian Territory, 1861, The Flight
of Opothleyahola" Journal of the West 11 (April 1972): 9-42, and Jay
Monaghan, Civil War on the Western Border: 18541865, (Boston:
Little, Brown and Co., 1955): 219-20, who says "Many runaway slaves
from other tribes joined the throng ..." (and on 221, that)
"Confederate Indians accused him [Opothleyahola] of driving off ...
three or four hundred of their slaves." Also, KHS, "The Seminoles in
the American Civil War" (297) listing the various Indian nations
with Opothleyahola w states "The party also included several hundred
Negroes," and Angle Debo, The Road to Disappearance: A History of
the Creek Indians, (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1941):
150
(18) Jonathan D. Greenberg, Staking a Claim: Jake Simmons and the
Making of an African-American Oil Dynasty,(New York: Athenaeum,
1990). Both Littlefield (247) and Greenberg (28) quote Commissioner
of Indian Affairs, D.N. Cooley's 1866 Annual Report reference to
this promise. Littlefield earlier (236) noted this promise, but
implied (239) that the Kansas treaty negotiations that first really
legalized it came just after Opothleyahola's death, and like Debo
(161), implies it was the black interpreter Harry Island who really
accomplished this.
(19) The units were led by Col. James McIntosh (no relation to
Chief William), who is reported (3) by Meserve to have been a
general and a graduate of West Point. Cf. White & White and
Daryl Morrison's book review for more on this engagement.
(20) See accounts of these battles in Abel, The American Indian
as Slaveholder and Secessionist; Annie Helloise Abel, The American
Indian in the Civil War, 1862-1865, with an Introduction by Theda
Purdue and Michael D. Green, (Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press, 1992); Lela J. McBridge, Opothleyahola and the Loyal
Muskogee: Their Flight to Kansas in the Civil War, (Jefferson, North
Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company Inc., Publishers,
2000, and White and White.
(21) See Monahgan, Civil War on the Western Border, chapter
XXII., and Abel, The American Indian in the Civil War, 1862-1865,
chapter XII.
(22) Littlefield, 239.
(23) See Jonathan D. Greenberg for a gripping account of some of
these events. Also see Abel, 1993, Chapter VIII especially, for a
detailed, if opinionated account of the treaty discussions, and
Littlefield for a more brief, but balanced assessment of them.
(24) L. Wright Jr., Creeks and Seminoles, 73ff.
(25) See Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee
Society, 1540-1866, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1979): 89.
(26) "Descriptive Report of First Indian Home Guard. Records of
Union Volunteer Organizations," vol. I National Archives and Records
Administration Record Group 94, Record of Adjutant. Also see Kansas
Adjutant General's Report, 1861-1865, vol. I, (Topeka, KS: Kansas
State Printing Co., 1896): 605.
(27) Cf. obituary in The Humboldt Union, 2 May 1912, said she had
lived in the area since "before the war" but a letter from Mrs. W.T.
McElroy, in the 9 May 1912 issue said after the war. Several
articles in a Humboldt Union series called "Neosho Valley Facts and
News," by Audrey Z. McGrew, mention her. See especially 30 March
1950. An unpublished typescript of an oral history taken mostly from
Gertrude Stovall by one Nat Armel (date unknown) called "Slave
Running in Allen County, Kansas" calls her Crosibyand and mentions
her underground railroad like activity.
(28) John H. Franklin and John W. Franklin, eds., My Life and an
Era: The Autobiography of Buck Franklin (Indiana University Press,
1999): passim.
(29) Cf. John H. Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of
Negro Americans, (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1969): 302ff
& 307 especially; Lerone Bennett Jr., Before the Mayflower: A
History of the Negro in America 1619-1966, (Chicago: Johnson
Publishing Co., 1966): 184ff, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Black
Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, (New York: World Publishing Co.
Meridian Books, 1964): 252ff. For examples of the impact of Amnesty
see John W. Graves, Town and Country: Race Relations in an
Urban-Rural Context, Arkansas, 1865-1905, (Fayetteville: University
of Arkansas Press, 1990): 74ff., and Howard A. White, The Freedmen's
Bureau in Louisiana., (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1970): 48ff.
(30) Charley Davis, a Cherokee freedman and the author's
great-great grandfather likely came to Humboldt a bit later (family
lore says in 1870, but we do not know from where.) The other black
pioneer families, besides the Landrums, with very likely direct
Great Escape connections that were commemorated were those of Perry
Adams, "Aunt Polly" Crosby (Crosslin), Chora Graves, Nathan Jackson,
Elizabeth Payne, Lewis Rogers, and Andrew Tecumseh.
(31) The pledge was written by Rev. Robert L. Baynham, the master
of ceremonies, and KIAANAFH vice president, and led by him and Chief
Beaver.
Willard R. Johnson, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Political
Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge,
Massachusetts)
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