Slavery Didn’t End in 1865
While Juneteenth commemorates U.S. Emancipation, few know that chattel slavery continued to be legally practiced in ‘Indian Country’ well past the close of the Civil War
June 19th, 1865, otherwise known as Juneteenth, marks the day that news of the end of the Civil War, and thus chattel slavery, reached the last Confederate stronghold resisting the Union Army in Galveston, Texas. But there remained one western territory within the U.S. that was still holding people of African descent under the bonds of enslavement until 1866.
The Five ‘Civilized’ Tribes — the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, and Seminole nations — had all adopted African chattel slavery, in some, form by the 1830s. And while the moniker of ‘civilized’ was given to the Five Tribes, at least in part, due to their marked participation in America’s racial capitalism, only two tribes came to resemble the brutality of the antebellum south.
It is important to recognize how Indigenous nations participated in American racial schemas — chattel slavery, Black codes, white supremacy, colorism—but it is just as important to recognize that process as slow, motivated by the desire to survive an unrelenting genocidal empire, and as a result of the degrading effects white supremacy had on Indigenous kinship.
The Seminoles were the most resistant of the Five Tribes and outright rejected American capitalism and chattel slavery until the 1840’s. The word ‘seminole’ itself comes from Muscogee Creek for ‘wild ones’ or ‘runaways.’ They were a conglomeration of people from several disparate and war-torn nations — the Creeks, Yuchis, Yamasee and other aboriginal remnants throughout the southeast region — as well as Africans who fled enslavement and found refuge in these networks of resistance in the late 1700’s. Such communities wreaked havoc across the south, often razing plantations and taking in enslaved Africans as kin, growing the tribe’s numbers over time. Eventually, the amount of melding between Indigenous and African people created such a reputation that even other tribes isolated from the Seminoles. Over time, however, forms of enslavement did develop.
Those who were enslaved in Seminole communities were held in a feudalistic network and simply paid recompense for shared resources and tribal protection. But at the close of the Second Seminole War and after the tribe’s forced removal from the southeast to present-day Oklahoma in 1842, Black codes began to infiltrate Seminole Nation. As neighboring Muscogee Creeks would raid and steal Black Seminoles into enslavement, Seminoles themselves began to use colorism and anti-Blackness to profit from the slave trade and gain more power in the eyes of the U.S. government. As a result, many Black Seminoles chose to follow the revered Black Seminole warrior and political leader, John Horse, south toward the Texas-Mexico border where they sought refuge in emancipated Mexican territories. This disparate band became known as the Absentee Seminoles as many never returned to Oklahoma when the Dawes Rolls were being recorded.
The first anti-black law in Cherokee Nation came in 1824, which made it illegal for a Cherokee slaver to emancipate someone in order to marry them. However, many Cherokee before the mid 1800s would treat what few enslaved peoples there were as a form of kin — many enslaved people had children born free within the nation or were themselves set free within the tribe. But as more colonizers and colonists formed relationships with the Cherokee, the number of enslaved people rose, and anti-Blackness began to infect the way the Cherokee would think about and treat dark skinned peoples regardless of their status within the tribe.
By the time the Cherokee were forced to relocate to what would become Oklahoma, they were led by the most revered Cherokee chief, John Ross, who was a wealthy planter and son of a Scottish settler and a Scottish-Cherokee mother. So in 1838 when Chief Ross conceded to Andrew Jackson’s brutal removal policy, some 1,600 enslaved Black folks followed as the tribe marched the Trail of Tears. At the start of the Civil War, the Cherokee were among the most supportive of the Confederacy as their economic and political sovereignty depended in large part on the slave trade which had ballooned the number of enslaved to roughly 4,000 people by 1860. It wasn’t until the Cherokee were stalled by the Union Army when slavery came to an end in Cherokee Nation in 1863.
The Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations underwent a similar transformation after the Revolutionary War. The Chickasaw were slowly pressured to conform to American racial capitalism when deerskins became less economically sustainable for the nation and as George Washington’s assimilation policies forced the tribe to relinquish communal hunting grounds or else suffer the fate of so many other tribes that resisted the rapidly growing genocidal empire. As cash crops began to fuel the Chickasaw economy, American Indian agents had remarked at the tribe’s participation in African chattel slavery as a boon to U.S.-Chickasaw relations — they believed further development of the slave trade would enhance the Chickasaw and really any Indigenous nation’s understanding of American property, ownership, and commercial gain.
Similarly, the Choctaw—a tribe closely related to the Chickasaw—had begun practicing African chattel slavery alongside the antebellum south almost in step with the southern economy’s expansion. Both tribes were known to have brutalized the people they enslaved in ways closely resembling the antebellum plantations that neighbored them. Slavery was abolished in the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations on April 28, 1866, after the tribes signed new treaties with the U.S. government at the start of Reconstruction. This treaty — a version of which all Five Tribes had to sign after the Civil War — emancipated any Black people who were still enslaved and dictated that all such freed men and women would be absorbed into their respective Indigenous nations as if they were blooded kin. Of all the Five Tribes, the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations were the most resistant of this statute.
Long before European colonization, Muscogee Creeks participated in ‘old world slavery’ where noncombatants — predominantly women and children of rival tribes — were forcefully taken into Creek captivity. Some of these captives, and almost always any children they bore, would eventually be fully absorbed as blooded kin. Such a practice was one method that served as a way to repopulate tribal numbers that dwindled after extensive conflict, but when the Muscogee interacted with the increasing droves of European colonizers, Creeks increasingly viewed war captives as commodities to be sold to Europeans in need of profitable labor in the 1600’s. In fact, Creeks became very active participants in the Indigenous Slave Trade—predating the Transatlantic Slave Trade—which shackled between two and five and a half million Native peoples into chattel slavery throughout the Caribbean and American colonies. In fact, Creeks would often raid neighboring tribes for the sole purpose of capturing and selling people into slavery.
However by the 1700’s as more Africans were brought to America during the on-ramp of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Creeks would begin taking in runaway Africans as their own kin as well as purchase African people from the American slave market. This led to an incredibly complex interracial society that was not necessarily bent on white supremacist racial dynamics until the 1860’s, thirty years after the Muscogee Creek were forced to relocate to present-day Oklahoma. And while Creeks held some 1,500 enslaved at that point, any mixed race child born from a Creek mother was a free Muscogee Creek even if their father was still enslaved. Furthermore, Muscogee Creeks didn’t establish Black codes preventing darker skinned tribal kin from being a full member of their society until post-Dawes Rolls and land allotment in the early 1900’s.
And yet it was here in Creek Nation where the last vestige of legal enslavement of African descendant people remained on American soil until June 14, 1866 when the Muscogee Creek signed their new treaty with the U.S. federal government a year after the Civil War came to its bloody end.
While each tribe had their own reasons for participating in America’s slave trade, by no means was such participation excusable. What these broad histories do reveal, however, is how sovereignty and survival hinged on a tribe’s understanding and wielding of Euro-American concepts of property and ownership. What is also revealing is the rapid shift of racial politics the Seminole, Cherokee, and Creeks underwent in the mid 1800’s leading up to the Civil War. As tensions grew between abolitionists and profiteers of the American slave trade, kinship was degraded directly because of insidious white supremacist ideologies about property, economy, and social status. By the time the Five Tribes were forced out from their ancestral homelands, it was clear that the choice to enslave more African descendant people and make use of Black codes increased as proximity to whiteness and white threats grew alongside them.
Slavery didn’t end on June 19th, 1865. And it didn’t fully end as a means of procuring profitable labor on June 14, 1866, either. As Jim Crow and its legacies live on within the fabric of American culture, politics, and economics, it is no wonder that these Five Tribes today are grappling with their own civil rights violations. For the past century, all Five Tribes have been systematically pushing out Black kin and Freedmen — terms that are more synonymous today than they were in 1898 during the land allotment proceedings in pre-statehood Oklahoma — withdrawing any power and privileges they would hold as full tribal citizens. Only the Cherokee have, at the time of this article’s release, reformed their constitution to readmit the thousands of Black kin and Freedmen who were delisted from their tribe from the 1970’s till 2017.
Reserving a day for America to recognize and celebrate the jubilee of Emancipation is necessary, but that celebration will remain a hollow song and dance without the voting rights, police reform, and reparations for economic and social inequities that this country has refused Black people for centuries. And it would be especially damning if America continues to ignore the battle for civil rights within the Indigenous nations they forced to act just like them lest they pay the ultimate price of resisting a genocidal, colonial empire.
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Learn more about these shared Black and Indigenous histories by listening to the ongoing three part series IN OUR BLOOD, produced by a LATTO thought.
