Barbara Krauthamer. Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. xiii + 211 pp. $29.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-0710-8.
Reviewed by Jennifer Stinson (Saginaw Valley State University)
Published on H-CivWar (October, 2015)
Commissioned by Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz (Eastern Illinois University)
African Americans, Choctaws, and Chickasaws in the Civil War Era
Barbara Krauthamer’s study of African Americans in the nineteenth-century Choctaw and Chickasaw nations encourages scholars to rethink the political trajectory, geographical spaces, and lived experience of slavery and emancipation. Throughout Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, Krauthamer weaves analysis of sectionalism, bondage, resistance, transitions to freedom, and Indian sovereignty into a compelling narrative of race in America.
Choctaws and Chickasaws created chattel slavery systems, racial ideologies, and emancipation practices that, Krauthamer argues, remained distinct from yet fundamentally intertwined with those of US southerners. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 trace the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emergence of racialized bondage within both Indian nations, examine enslaved blacks’ community life, and illustrate connections between sectionalism, slave resistance, and Indian sovereignty struggles. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 focus on emancipation, Reconstruction, and blacks’ and Indians’ conflicting but perpetually linked quests for citizenship after the Civil War. Krauthamer examines the 1866 treaty that freed blacks within the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, discusses freedmen’s political activism, and explores freedpeople’s efforts to control their destinies amid new waves of westward black migration and through negotiations with Indian and US federal officials. Of particular significance in Krauthamer’s analysis of race and Reconstruction is the following argument: “Despite the apparent contradiction between defending black people’s freedom and rights and undermining Native people’s political and territorial autonomy, both aspects of federal policy emerged from the same set of Reconstruction-era ideologies and visions of the future” (p. 11).
The book’s early chapters make important contributions to both African American and Native American studies. Chapter 1 adds complexity to existing scholarly narratives of race-based slavery’s emergence and significance among southern Indians. Choctaws and Chickasaws neither adopted whites’ hierarchies wholesale, nor came to value slaves solely as market commodities. Instead, as Krauthamer insightfully shows, members of these nations who enslaved blacks advanced a new gendered order of work and power. Whereas earlier generations of Indian women had earned respect through farming, antebellum Indian men now gained authority by commanding black male farm laborers. Chapter 2 places enslaved African Americans’ religiosity within the context of colonialist Christian missionary work among southern Indians.
Regarding the Civil War era, Black Slaves, Indian Masters aims to show, as earlier scholarship has not, that “enslaved people’s resistance efforts in the 1850s and Indian slaveholders’ responses were bound up in the mounting crisis over slavery” (p. 78). Krauthamer’s analysis of blacks’ resistance in connection to Choctaw and Chickasaw laws, border tensions, and US legislation provides insight into what was at stake for masters and slaves as sectional crises engulfed the West. As she explains, white-held slaves’ escapes to Indian Territory and Indian-held slaves’ escapes from it intensified political strife between the United States and the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations. Indian slaveholders did not just fear that runaways from US states would inspire rebellions among their own bondspeople; rather, they accused the US slave catchers who entered Indian Territory to reclaim these runaways of trespassing. Extension of the Fugitive Slave Act into Indian Territory and the Kansas-Nebraska crisis inflamed Choctaw and Chickasaw leaders’ anxieties about Indian sovereignty and the fate of slavery even further. At the same time, Indian masters, mistresses, and officials insisted upon punishing enslaved people’s resistance according to their own nations’ laws and customs. The evidence Krauthamer sets forth about the concerns Indians expressed and actions they took supports her argument that Choctaws and Chickasaws “understood the ways their lives could be changed by events in the states, and they also recognized the moments when they might alter the course of things through their own actions” (p. 78).
Krauthamer’s analysis of bondspeople’s resistance in the 1850s is less consistent in demonstrating that blacks consciously connected their fights for freedom to larger sectional crises or to Choctaw and Chicasaw efforts to control their nations’ destinies. Such resistance ranged from sassing masters to murdering them and from observing the Sabbath to imbibing alcohol. But the book’s discussion of a wave of arsons, escapes, and insurrection activities that occurred in and around Indian Territory in 1860 does convincingly show that enslaved people used their knowledge of Indian politics and mounting sectional hostilities to advance their freedom. Additionally, Krauthamer’s analysis of wide-ranging resistance is valuable for other reasons. It adds depth and breadth to historians’ understanding of how enslaved people used their bodies, words, social ties, and geographical awareness to defy authority and carve out spaces of freedom. As Krauthamer notes, other scholars have examined these forms of resistance on US plantations and within Louisiana neighborhoods. But Black Slaves, Indian Masters shows how such acts transpired in Indian Territory’s trading posts, missions, and towns.
Discussion of enslaved blacks’ or Indian masters’ involvement in the fighting of the Civil War does not receive significant attention in Krauthamer’s text. As she notes, “Choctaw and Chickasaw men served with Confederate troops,” and “nearly a century of scholarship has assessed the causes and reasoning that compelled the Indian nations to enter treaty relations with the Confederacy” (p. 99). In addition, she briefly indicates that enslaved people in Choctaw country tried to start an insurrection in response to their belief that Union troops had reached their region. She notes, too, that some slaves took advantage of wartime conditions to flee to Union posts or to join the Union army. But rather than elaborate upon Indians’ battle experiences, and rather than investigate bondspeople’s insurrection plans or experiences in Union spaces, Krauthamer emphasizes Indian leaders’ wartime motivations. Unlike previous scholars, she argues that Choctaws and Chickasaws equated the sustaining of sovereignty with the sustaining of slavery.
With respect to the wartime and postbellum periods, Krauthamer’s attention to the interplay of Indian nations’ struggles for sovereignty and black bondspeople’s bids for freedom adds new texture to our understanding of emancipation’s contingencies and trajectories. Blacks enslaved by Choctaws and Chickasaws endured bondage for months and years beyond their counterparts. Although both nations allied with the Confederacy, neither assumed the status of a Confederate state; therefore, Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to their bondspeople. Neither did the Thirteenth Amendment. Whereas the Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole abolished slavery by the Civil War’s end, the Choctaw and Chickasaw did not do so until 1866. Their decision to end the institution, through a treaty that the two nations made jointly with the US government, derived neither from Indian leader’s wish to liberate bondspeople nor from capitulation to Union victory. Rather, the treaty predicated the nations’ access to resources upon emancipation, and “wove them together, effectively linking freedom and land as fungibles” (p. 114). To gain US payments and private property allotments, both nations’ leaders had to free black slaves and recognize them as Choctaw or Chickasaw citizens.
Krauthamer reveals new twists and turns in the circuitous route blacks traveled to freedom and citizenship, charting their active role in that journey and linking it to larger Civil War-era contests. As she rightly points out, portraying the 1866 treaty’s emancipation provisions “only as a strategic assault” by US officials against Indians’ sovereignty “minimizes emancipation’s profound meanings and consequences in black people’s lives” (pp. 117-118). One of the most striking revelations of Krauthamer’s text is the extreme violence blacks faced at the hands of Choctaw and Chickasaw masters in the age or emancipation. Evidence of death threats, beatings, and shootings adds a new breadth to historians’ understanding of the brutality that afflicted blacks even as they embraced freedom. Here, and particularly given that many accounts of this Indian violence come to us filtered through the words of whites, it would be interesting to know if discourses of alleged Indian savagery informed the tone of particularly gruesome descriptions of attacks. Krauthamer addresses blacks’ role in attaining citizenship and enriching their freedom in intertwined arenas of family, land, work, political mobilization, and cultural identification. Her text’s attention to family is brief, leaving the reader wanting to learn more about how specific families pursued freedom’s day-to-day challenges and rewards in the 1860s. Did family units alter in any way? Did kinfolk unite or divide over decisions to pursue Indian or US citizenship or regarding whether they identified as black or Indian? Krauthamer’s sources do not yield such information. But fortunately evidence is more abundant regarding connections between political activism, citizenship, and cultural identification. Hundreds of black men met in 1869 with US and Indian officials, including federal Indian agents, Choctaw principle chief Allen Wright, and Chickasaw governor Cyrus Harris, to advocate alternately for US citizenship on the one hand or for Choctaw or Chickasaw citizenship on the other. They couched their desires for Indian citizenship in references to their use and valuing of each nation’s culture and language.
Finally, Black Slaves, Indian Masters is valuable for the future analysis it can inspire among scholars. The book’s narrative of illness, hunger, brutal work, and death during and after removal journeys—which Krauthamer illustrates vividly through the words of Choctaw slaveholder David Folsom and former Chickasaw-held slave Polly Colbert—invites comparison with scholarly accounts of slaves’ forced Cotton Boom-era relocations across the Old Southwest with white masters. There is also room to explore contrasts. Krauthamer emphasizes similarities between black men’s political activism in Indian Territory and in the US South. But did these men’s strategies differ in any way? Did geographical remoteness or non-urban settings in Indian Territory open up or preclude certain avenues of political mobilization? If evidence of black women’s political engagement in Choctaw or Chickasaw lands comes to light, how will that enrich the picture of freedpeople’s postbellum advocacy and compare or contrast with US southern black women’s contributions? Given Krauthamer’s analysis of Indian mistresses’ control over enslaved women’s work, movements, and speech, what would such evidence reveal about contentions between black women’s citizenship struggles and Choctaw or Chickasaw women’s pursuit of their own nations’ rights? With reference to the Civil War, what specific news of troop movements could enslaved people have learned in Indian Territory? Did Frederick Douglass’s or other press reports that had reached out to Indian-held slaves in the 1850s continue to do so during the war? Once in a Union regiment or at a Union camp, what particular hardships or new experiences of freedom would self-emancipated people have faced?
These questions remain for the future. For now, Krauthamer’s history substantially enriches our understanding of the Civil War era and its connections to the history of race in America.
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Citation:
Jennifer Stinson. Review of Krauthamer, Barbara, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South.
H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=39987
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