134 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
slaves. Roughly 60-70 percent of those without slaves owned fewer
than a hundred acres of land. Less than 1 percent owned more than
a hundred slaves. Seventeen percent of settlers in the South owned
one to nine slaves, and only 6.5 percent owned more than ten. Ten
percent of the settlers who owned no slaves were also landless, while
that many more managed to barely survive on small dirt farms. The
Confederate Army reflected the same kind of percentages.1 Those
who, even today, claim that "states' rights" caused Southern seces
sion and the Civil War use these statistics to argue that slavery was
not the cause of the Civil War, but that is false. Every settler in the
Southern states aspired to own land and slaves or to own more land
and more slaves, as both social status and wealth depended on the
extent of property owned. Even small and landless farmers relied
on slavery-based rule: the local slave plantation was the market for
what small farmers produced, and planters hired landless settlers as
overseers and sharecroppers. Most non-slave-owning settlers sup
ported and fought for the Confederacy.LINCOLN'S "FREE SOIL" FOR SETTLERS
Abraham Lincoln's campaign for the presidency appealed to the vote
of land-poor settlers who demanded that the government "open"
Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi. They were called "free
soilers," in reference to cheap land free of slavery. New gold rushes
and other incentives brought new waves of settlers to squat on In
digenous land. For this reason, some Indigenous people preferred
a Confederate victory, which might divide and weaken the United
States, which had grown ever more powerful. Indigenous nations in
Indian Te rritory were more directly affected by the Civil War than
anywhere else. As discussed in chapter 6, the southeastern nations
the Cherokees, Muskogees, Seminoles, Choctaws, and Chickasaws
("Five Civilized Tribes")-were forcibly removed from their home
lands during the Jackson administration, but in the Indian Terri
tory they rebuilt their townships, farms, ranches, and institutions,
including newspapers, schools, and orphanages. Although a tiny
elite of each nation was wealthy and owned enslaved Africans and