Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 7–9
The Nations in the War Over Slavery
History Class · Level band: Grades 7–9
English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.
The Nations in the War Over Slavery (Grades 7–9)
Status: Researched draft — cultural review pending
How to read this entry: Documented fact = the fact stands in a named source — the treaty texts, the official records, the nations' own historians. Tradition — the people's own account = what the nations and the descendants teach. Debated / Claim = a disputed point, labelled where it stands. This is the Grades 7–9 telling of the entry, carrying the service; the full entry stands in the senior band.
Documented Fact. When the American Civil War began in 1861, the Indigenous nations of Indian Territory (today's Oklahoma) had been there only about twenty years — driven west on the Trail of Tears within living memory. The war split the nations themselves. The Confederacy signed alliances with the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole nations — but many of their people refused, and the nations fought on both sides.
Documented Fact — the flight to Kansas. The elderly Muscogee leader Opothleyahola would not join the Confederacy. About 9,000 people followed him toward safety in Kansas: loyal Muscogee and Seminole families, and enslaved and free Black people who joined the column hoping for freedom. Confederate troops — including soldiers from the nations on the other side — attacked them three times in late 1861. The last battle, at Chustenahlah on 26 December, was fought in a blizzard. About 2,000 of the 9,000 died on the road and in the refugee camps, from battle, cold and sickness. Survivors called the road the Trail of Blood on Ice. Opothleyahola died in a Kansas camp in 1863. But the survivors did not give up: from those camps, the Union formed three regiments of Indian Home Guards, who fought their way back and helped win the territory — Native, Black and white Union soldiers fighting side by side.
Documented Fact — the pen that ended the war in the east. At Appomattox on 9 April 1865, General Lee surrendered to General Grant. The officer who wrote out the surrender terms in fair copy was Ely S. Parker, a Seneca leader — Grant's military secretary. Parker had earlier been refused permission to practise law, and refused an officer's commission, because as a tribal member he was not counted a United States citizen. When Lee saw him, he said, "I am glad to see one real American here." Parker answered: "We are all Americans." In Michigan, a whole company of Anishinaabe sharpshooters — Company K — served in the Union's toughest battles; wounded men of that company, surrounded at the Battle of the Crater in 1864, sang their death song as they died, as a fellow officer recorded.
Documented Fact — the last surrender. The very last Confederate general to give up, on 23 June 1865 — two and a half months after Appomattox — was also a Native officer: Stand Watie, a Cherokee general of the Confederacy. The nations had stood on both sides of the war over slavery: some fought to end it, some fought for the slaveholders' side, and the peace that followed forced every one of the five nations to abolish slavery and promise citizenship to the people they had enslaved — a promise whose keeping is still being argued in courts today, as the senior class tells in full.
The thing to hold onto. These nations fought in America's war over slavery one generation after America had driven them from their homes — and men from those nations stood at both the first great surrender of that war and the last. Their part in it is not a footnote. It is in the surrender documents themselves.
Companion classes in this band: The Code Talkers · They Signed On — The Long Service. The full Civil War entry — the divided nations, slavery within the nations, and the freedmen's citizenship fight to the present day — stands in the senior band.