Search Results

This chapter examines the impact of the American Civil War on Cherokee identity and diaspora. A little over two decades had passed since thousands of Cherokees were forced to relocate from their homeland in the Southeast and create a new homeland in Indian Territory, the Cherokee people found themselves embroiled in the Civil War. The war became an economic, social, and legal calamity for the Cherokee Nation and gave rise to tens of thousands of Cherokee refugees. Most Cherokees considered the prospect of a large-scale war in the trans-Mississippi West as a threat to the future well-being of the diaspora’s political homeland. Others, especially wealthier Cherokees and Cherokee slave owners, believed they shared a social and economic stake in the fate of the Confederacy. This chapter considers how the American Civil War defined Cherokee identity in different legal ways in various parts of the Cherokee diaspora.

This chapter examines the politics of Cherokee removal in the early nineteenth century within the larger context of Cherokee diasporic politics between the 1817 treaty—in which the Cherokees ceded 651,520 acres of land in Georgia and Tennessee to the United States government—and the opening of the 1840s, when most Cherokees settled in the trans-Mississippi West. No event changed the course of nineteenth-century Cherokee history more profoundly than the forced migration along the so-called Trail of Tears during the years 1838–1839. In preparation for the journey into the West, Cherokees were forced to huddle around military establishments such as Fort Butler in North Carolina. In both the cis-Mississippi and the trans-Mississippi West, innovative groups of Cherokee migrants reestablished political affiliations and gave new meaning to family and kinship relations. This chapter also explores the issue of Cherokee identity in relation to Cherokee diaspora.

This chapter focuses on the Cherokee people’s uncertain future in the wake of their forced removal and resettlement in the trans-Mississippi West during the late 1830s. It examines how the Cherokees worked hard to overcome the trauma of being separated from what they believed to be their ancient homeland in the Southeast of the American republic by forging a political homeland in Indian Territory. It considers how this new political homeland became an important symbol that reminded Cherokees living throughout North America and the Pacific that there was a geographical refuge from the settler colonial world, occupied and governed by fellow Cherokees. It also explores how feelings of distrust, suspicion, and a desire for vengeance pervaded Cherokee public life in Indian Territory; the reformation of Cherokee nationalism in relation to Cherokee diaspora; the effects of racial slavery on Cherokees living in diaspora; and the connection between what it meant to be Cherokee and the memory of forced removal.

This chapter examines questions related to Cherokee identity, social status, “blood,” and migration—what the prominent Cherokee leader W. P. Adair called the refugee business—in the trans-Mississippi West in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War. More specifically, it considers the social, political, and economic problems caused by refugees who settled in and around Indian Territory after the Civil War. It also discusses the impact of frontier violence on people of Cherokee descent after the Civil War; the migration of North Carolina Cherokees to Indian Territory; and how the loss of land undermined the political homeland of the Cherokee diaspora. It shows how the migration of people of every race, religion, and ethnic background to the West following President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Homestead Act in 1862 affected the Cherokee Nation in terms of land ownership.

This chapter discusses the Reconstruction of the trans-Mississippi West. Across the plains and deserts, the government treated the peoples it vanquished as if their lands were conquered provinces. Their original inhabitants were denied the vote, their lands were subject to confiscation, their villages sacked and burned. The reconstructing of the West and of the South occurred at the same time, but clearly they had very different outcomes. War's end changed the way the government dealt with the so-called Indian problem. No longer were tribes seen as separate nations, with whom formal agreements could be made.

This book begins with a discussion of the sectional controversy over slavery in the territories of the trans-Mississippi West. Although it was strongly linked with different interpretations of state versus federal authority under the Constitution, the controversy did not directly cause the secession crisis and Civil War. Even so, during the 1840s and 1850s, the territorial question sectionalized American politics and made possible the 1860 victory of a northern sectional president. During the 1850s, disputes over enforcement of the new Fugitive Slave Law, likewise connected with different views about the proper balance between state and federal authority, also contributed significantly to the sense of alienation between northerners and free southerners. When the new and explicitly antislavery Republican Party almost captured the White House in 1856, many residents of the slave states declared that the election of such a candidate would provide just cause for secession.