The Cherokee Nation in the Civil War

By Clarissa W. Confer
Illustrated, maps, bibliography endnotes, index, 216 pp., 2007. University of Oklahoma Press, 2800 Venture Dr., Norman, OK 73069-8216, $24.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Ted Alexander
Ted Alexander is a historian and author of more than 100 articles for various publications and several books. He is Park Historian at Antietam National Battlefield.

Review:
It is believed that more than 20,000 American Indians served and fought in the Civil War. This included warriors both blue and gray; Iroquois from New York, Chippewas from Michigan, Catawba from South Carolina and Choctaws from Mississippi, to name a few. One of the most notable Indian Nations to participate in the war was the Cherokee.

Nearly 90 years ago, historian Annie Heloise Abel broke ground with a three-volume study of the role of the Cherokees and other Indian tribes in the Civil War. Since that time there has been periodic publication of books focusing on some aspect of American Indian involvement in the war. Some of these studies have concentrated on the political and social, while others have just looked at military operations. This is one of the latest of that tradition.

The Cherokees were among the Indian Nations of the American Southeast that were dubbed "The Five Civilized Tribes" by their white contemporaries. Indeed, by the early19th-century these Indians had a legislature and constitution modeled after the United States, many were successful planters and owned slaves and they had their own schools and churches as well as their own alphabet.

The others, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole, also served in both the Union and Confederate ranks. They all shared a similar tragic fate when forcibly removed by the federal government from their Southern homeland to "Indian Territory" (what is now the state of Oklahoma). The trek of the Cherokees was particularly harsh with thousands succumbing to disease and the elements. It was forever after known as "The Trail of Tears."

This study deals with the Cherokee Nation at the outbreak of the Civil War and its resulting participation in that conflict. The story line reads like the plot out of a Hollywood movie. Cherokees are forced west. The government fails to live up to its obligations of providing food, annuities and protection against hostile Indian tribes and outlaws. The Cherokees turn to the fledgling Confederate States of America for support. The tribe then becomes divided, many siding with the Union under Chief John Ross. An entire Confederate Cherokee regiment defects to the Union side while others serve the South under Stand Watie.

The author cites one estimate of 10,500 Cherokees loyal to the Union and 6,500 supporting the South. In the midst of the political discord exists guerilla warfare, military occupations and battle, starvation and more than 6,000 refugees from both sides.

At war's end the Cherokee Nation is in ruins. Watie, the only American Indian general in the war, is the last to surrender - June 25, 1865, more than two months after Appomattox. If this is ever put on the "Silver Screen," actor Wes Studi, himself a Cherokee from Oklahoma, should play the part of Stand Watie.

Clarissa W. Confer has successfully blended social and military history. This includes the role of Northern missionaries and abolitionists in the prewar years; the plight of African American slaves and freedmen in the Cherokee Nation; the roles and trials of women left behind by their soldier spouses and the tribal politics that made this a civil war within the Civil War.

A chapter is also devoted to the battles both in and out of the territory in which the Cherokees took part. Whites' observations of Cherokee soldiers and charges of atrocities such as scalpings are covered, as well as the life of the common soldier in the Cherokee ranks.

This is not a definitive history. However, readers of this work will find it to be a useful primer on the subject and worthy of standing alongside the works of Annie Heloise Abel on the bookshelf.