"Indian Country" 135private estates, the majority of the people continued their collective
agrarian practices. All five nations signed treaties with the Confed
eracy, each for similar reasons. Within each nation, however, there
was a clear division based on class, often misleadingly expressed as
a conflict between "mixed-bloods" and "full-bloods." That is, the
wealthy, assimilated, slave-owning minority that dominated politics
favored the Confederacy, and the non-slave-owning poor and tradi
tional majority wanted to stay out of the Anglo-American civil war.
Historian David Chang found that Muskogee nationalism and well
founded distrust of federal power played a major role in bringing
about that nation's strategic alliance with the Confederacy. Chang
writes: "Was the Creek council's alliance with the South a racist de
fense of slavery and its class privileges, or was it a nationalist defense
of Creek lands and sovereignty? The answer has to be 'both."' 2
John Ross, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, at first called
for neutrality, but changed his mind for reasons similar to the Mus
kogees and asked the Cherokee council for authority to negotiate
a treaty with the CSA. Nearly seven thousand men of the five na
tions went into battle for the Confederacy. Stand Watie, a Chero
kee, held the post of brigadier general in the Confederate Army.
His First Indian Brigade of the Army of the Trans-Mississippi ,was
among the last units in the field to surrender to the Union Army on
June 23 , 1865, more than two months after Lee's surrender of the
Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse in April
- During the war, however, many Indigenous soldiers became
disillusioned and went over to the Union forces, along with enslaved
African Americans who fled to freedom. 3
Another story is equally important, though less often told. A
few months after the war broke out, some ten thousand men in
Indian Territory, made up of Indigenous volunteers, along with
African Americans who had freed themselves and even some Anglo
Americans, engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Confederate
Army. They fought from Oklahoma into Kansas, where many of
them joined unofficial Union units that had been organized by abo
litionists who had trained with John Brown years earlier. This was
not likely the kind of war the Lincoln administration had desired-a
multiethnic volunteer Union contingent fighting pro-slavery forces