Mixed Race Studies

Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South

University of North Carolina Press
February 2015
232 pages
6.125 x 9.25
11 halftones, notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4696-2187-6

Barbara Krauthamer, Associate Professor of History
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes’ removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory. The tribes formulated racial and gender ideologies that justified this practice and marginalized free black people in the Indian nations well after the Civil War and slavery had ended. Through the end of the nineteenth century, ongoing conflicts among Choctaw, Chickasaw, and U.S. lawmakers left untold numbers of former slaves and their descendants in the two Indian nations without citizenship in either the Indian nations or the United States. In this groundbreaking study, Barbara Krauthamer rewrites the history of southern slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native American slaveholders and the black people they enslaved.

Krauthamer’s examination of slavery and emancipation highlights the ways Indian women’s gender roles changed with the arrival of slavery and changed again after emancipation and reveals complex dynamics of race that shaped the lives of black people and Indians both before and after removal.

A Vanishing Race

Chronicles of Oklahoma
Volume 4, Number 1 (June, 1926)
pages 100-115

G. A. Crossett, Editor
Caddo Herald

One of the largest and most intelligent tribes of original American Indians in the United States today is the Choctaws, who inhabit the southeastern portion of Oklahoma.

The Choctaws formerly occupied the central and northern portions of Mississippi. At the time of the war of the American Independence they numbered about twelve thousand. They early made friends with the white settlers, and rarely gave serious trouble to their white neighbors. They were loyal to the United States Government.

AIDED JACKSON

In the War of 1812, the Choctaws furnished a large regiment of soldiers to the American army, commanded by Andrew Jackson. Their outstanding leader was a young man named Apushmataha. He was unlettered, but a brilliant leader of men; strong and wise in council, eloquent and convincing in speech. He made a journey to the neighboring tribes of Cherokees, Creeks and Chickasaws, and won them over to the cause of the Americans in this campaign. It was during this campaign that he and Andrew Jackson became fast friends—a friendship that continued as long as both men lived. He was with Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and his men gave a good account of themselves, being expert marksmen with their popular weapons, the rifle.

Later years saw Apushmataha the spokesman of his people in Washington, before the Interior Department and Congress. His intimacy and friendship with Jackson was renewed when that warrior became president. It was during this period that agitation for removal of the Indian tribes from the southeastern states began. The white settlers had found the soil good, and wanted it all for themselves…

…By nature the Choctaws were roving, loved the field and forest, the great outdoors. He liked the dew, the big wide places; he built his houses far apart. He communed with his God, Chiowa, he called Him, in His vaulted dome; he felt the pull of the Great Spirit in the outdoors. Not many fullbloods are left. He had mixed his blood with the white, until they truly are a, vanishing race. He has taken on white man’s ways; he has accepted his God; he has taken his language; he has built homes like his white brothers. He is no longer pure American in his blood. Now he lives like the white man. He has as many characteristics as there are people. He has take on the good and the bad. He is simply now like the average American white man.

Read the entire article here.