Mixed Race Studies

Fighting the ‘White Man’s War’

The New York Times
2013-07-19

Aaron Barnhart and Diane Eickhoff

The Battle of Honey Springs was one of the only Civil War engagements where the majority of the combatants were non-white.

Three miles down a gravel road near Rentiesville, Okla., sits a portable building that, for now, serves as the headquarters for the Honey Springs Battlefield State Historic Site. Here, on July 17, 1863, one of the Civil War’s most unique, consequential — and forgotten — battles took place. The Battle of Honey Springs was one of the few engagements in which the majority of the combatants were nonwhite, and it played an outsize role in the future of the Indian Territory, long after the war ended.

When the Civil War broke out, most American Indians on the frontier understandably wanted no part of it. They were far from the action, and many had recently been forcibly removed to present-day Kansas and Oklahoma. And yet, many Indians were eventually pulled into “the white man’s war.”

Unlike the Indians who were herded into present-day Kansas from Northern states, the Five Civilized Tribes of Indian Territory — Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole — were Southern in their outlook and politics. Across five Southern states, they intermarried with whites, built houses in town and owned plantations with slaves.

None of this protected them from envious neighbors who, as the interior South was settled in the early 19th century, demanded that authorities seize their sovereign lands. By the early 1820s the “Great Father,” as they called the American presidents, was summoning chiefs to Washington to sign land-cession treaties. These agreements became wedges that violently split each of the five tribal nations…

…Meanwhile, the pro-Southern Indian regiments led by Gen. Stand Watie, a mixed-blood Cherokee, and Gen. Douglas Hancock Cooper were proving useful to the Confederacy. Cooper, a Mississippi native and veteran of the Mexican War, was a commissioned colonel of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations before the war. Watie, a skilled horseman, worked well with the white guerrillas who assumed a larger role in the Confederate military now that the regular army was largely gone from the region.

After the Battle of Pea Ridge gave the Union Army control over Missouri, the war leadership in Richmond had ordered most Western regiments east to slow the momentum of Ulysses S. Grant along the Mississippi River. Whether this abandonment of the trans-Mississippi was inevitable or a big blunder, it put in play the territory that had acted as a buffer for Texas and extended the Southern empire to the border of Kansas, the most aggressively anti-slavery state in the Union, with more men per capita enlisted in the federal army than any other state.

By June 1863, Kansas had a general who was ready to occupy this former Confederate stronghold. Gen. James G. Blunt, physician by training and a staunch ally of James Lane, was the new commander of the Army of the Frontier. He welcomed these newly formed black and Indian regiments, which now included companies from the Cherokee nation that had become disillusioned with the Confederacy…

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