The images that we have of the Southern history are forever shaped by
the mythic: spanish moss clothed trees frame an ante-bellum plantation;
stark images of black and white enveloped within a culture of racial polarization
weave a narrative that has become our national image of the "Old South."
Etchings burned so deep into our collective consciousness that they belie
the very nature of the South itself, we are captivated by a false consciousness
that disallows us from understanding the truly dynamic and complex nature
of our own collective history. Even our understanding of nineteenth century
and of the issues and individuals involved with the struggle for our national
identity is so permeated with "myth-understanding" that it almost ceases
to function in anything other than an ideological sense.
The truth is that seldom are things as simple as they appear. Though
it is little acknowledged, the history of the South is permanently colored
by miscegenation. The issue of miscegenation (or "mongrelization" as it
often called) has served as the rallying cry for generations of racists
and hatemongerers, but it is as pervasive a fact in Southern society as
almost any other social phenomenon. As early as 1630, the Governor of Virginia
ordered citizen Hugh Davis to be "soundly whipped before an assembly of
Negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame
of a Christian by defiling his body in lying with a Negro, which he was
to acknowledge next Sabbath day." [1] Finally
outlawed in Virginia in 1691, miscegenation had become a critical issue
in colonial society:
And for the prevention of that abominable mixture and spurious
issue which hereafter may increase in this dominion, as well as by negroes,
mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with the English, or other white women,
as by their unlawful accompanying with one another, Be it hereby enacted
by the authorities aforesaid, and it is hereby enacted, That for the time
to see, whatsoever English or other white man or woman being shall freely
intermarry with a negro, mulatto, or Indian man or woman bond or free shall
within three months after such marriage be banished and removed from this
dominion forever, and that the justices of each respective countie within
this dominion make it their particular care, that this act be put in effectual
execution. [2]
If one looks closely at the statement above, we find that the colonial
Virginia fathers were equally concerned about intermarriage or relationships
with "Indians" or "mulattos" as they were with those between colonials
and African Americans. The presence of Native Americans and those with
mixed blood were of seeming importance at this point in American history;
later historians were the write these individuals out of history in order
to perpetuate the black and white "master-narrative" that became the linchpin
of Southern history. The role of the Native Americans in ante-bellum society,
the presence and contributions of Africans to Native American societies,
the important story of Afro-Indians in the Old South, and the issues of
Native American slavery have been relegated to the back pages of history.
In 1920, Carter G. Woodson observed that "one of the longest unwritten
chapters of the history of the United States is that treating of the relations
of the negroes and the Indians." [3] In nearly
all discussions of Southern history, the presence of the multicultural
nature of Southern society has been seldom explored. In the introduction
to his chapter "The Indian and the Negro" in The Story of the Negro,
Professor
Booker T. Washington states, "The association of the negro with the Indian
has been so intimate and varied on this continent, and the similarities
as well as the differences of their fortunes and characters are so striking
that I am tempted to enter at some length into a discussion of their relations
of each to the other, and to the white man in this country."
[4]
The late William G. McLoughlin noted in his essay "Red, White, and Black
in the ante-bellum South," that there is little discussion of the red,
white and black because "two ideas at once are as much as the average
American can hold in his head." [5] However,
if we are to understand what happened to the Cherokee Nation in the years
1855-1867, we must explore the "red, white, and black" of the Old South.
Myth-understanding and Early America
There is little doubt that the first contact between Africans and Native
Americans did not occur within the contexts of European colonial expansion
in the early sixteenth century. Though most texts detailing red/black relations
on the Southern frontier begin with Africans among the explorations of
Spaniards De Allyon, De Leon, Cordoba, De Soto, and Narvaez, evidently
contact was much older. It is an underappreciation of this often untold
history of the deep relationship between Africans and Indians that lies
at the root of modern misunderstanding of much of American history.
Long before Christopher Columbus, Africans had been using favorable
sea currents and small boats to come to the Americas. One of the reasons
that Columbus was sent on his return voyage was "a report of the Indians
of this Espanola who said that there had come to Espanola from the south
and south-east, a black people who have the tops of their spears made of
a metal which they call `guanin' (gold)." [6]
The North Equatorial Current runs from West Africa to the Caribbean Islands
and Southeastern United States; Thor Heyerdahl, in his Kon Tiki and
Ra expeditions, proved that even the smallest boats could make this
passage. [7]
There is also ample evidence of pre-Columbian contact with Africans
in a variety of settings in Mesoamerica. The African characteristics of
Olmec sculptures, similarities between African pyramids and reed boats
and their counterparts in Mesoamerica, and pictographic/linguistic similarities
between Northern African and Muscogean cultures are all evidence of ancient
contact. [8] Upon observing the Olmec sculptures
in 1869, Dr. Jose Melgar y Serrana reported "As a work of art, it is without
exaggeration a magnificent sculpture, but what astonished me was the Ethiopic
type represented. I reflect that there had undoubtedly been Negroes in
this country." [9]
Dr. Leo Wiener proposed that African traders from Guinea founded a colony
near Mexico City from which they exerted a cultural and commercial influence
extending north to Canada and south to Peru. He also suggests that Native
American ancient cultures, including the Maya, Aztec, and Inca civilizations,
were directly or indirectly of African origins. [10]
Historians and scientists from Augustus Le Plongeon in the nineteenth century
to Barry Fell in the latter half of the twentieth century have asserted
African contact with ancient America. [11] Whatever
the truth is, it is certain that it was along the coastal rim of the Caribbean
and the Gulf of Mexico where the early explorers encountered most African-Indians
and tri-racial mixtures. [12]
Taking the African presence in ancient America seriously causes us to
reframe our understanding of the relationship between African Americans
and Native Americans in the Southeastern United States. What are the implications
of this research for understanding Native American attitudes regarding
race; moreover, what are the possibilities of African influence in the
development of the temple mound culture in the Southeastern United States?
Does this historic background explain the ease in which in which Africans
learned to speak and translate indigenous languages and the ready assimilation
of runaway slaves into Native American communities? It is not the purpose
of this paper to fully explore the meaning of this critically underexplored
phenomena, but to simply offer up the possibility of a thicker description
of southeastern culture. [13]
Modern historians believe that the first Africans to be encountered
by Native Americans were those who accompanied the early Spanish explorations
of the Southeastern United States. Estavanico, "an Arabian black, native
of Acamor," who accompanied Narvaez into Florida distinguished himself
by his linguistic ability and "was in constant conversation" with the Indians.
[14]
In 1540, Hernando de Soto encountered the Cherokee and kidnapped the Lady
of Cofitachequi, a prominent Cherokee leader. Escaping from De Soto, she
returned home with an African slave belonging to one of De Soto's officers
and "they lived together as man and wife."
[15]
Black slaves also played a critical role in Luis Vazquez de Ayllon's aborted
colony in South Carolina; a slave revolt occurred in the colony and many
of the African slaves fled to live among the Cherokee. [16]
It is important to understand the purpose of these early Spanish explorations
in the Southeast. Ponce de Leon's 1512 patent from the Spanish authorities
provided that any Indians that he might discover in the Americas should
be divided among the members of his expedition that they should "derive
whatever advantage might be secured thereby." [17]
De Ayllon's 1523 cedula authorized him to "purchase prisoners of
war held as slaves held by the natives, to employ them on his farms and
export them as he saw fit, without the payment of any duty whatsoever upon
them." [18]
When De Soto landed in Florida with his soldiers in 1539, he brought
with him blood-hounds, chains, and iron collars for the acquisition and
exportation of Indian slaves. Hundreds of men women and children were captured
by de Soto and transported to the coasts for shipment to the Caribbean
and to Spain. [19] A Cherokee from Oklahoma
remembered his father's tale of the Spanish slave trade, "At an early state
the Spanish engaged in the slave trade on this continent and in so doing
kidnapped hundreds of thousands of the Indians from the Atlantic and Gulf
Coasts to work their mines in the West Indies." [20]
Slavery as a phenomenon was not unknown to the Cherokee Nation or to
Native Americans. However, it is distinctively different in both its content
and its context as that which was practiced by the European. Rudi Halliburton
in Red Over Black, his extensive work on slavery in the Cherokee
Nation, concludes that "slavery, as an institution, did not exist among
the Cherokees before the arrival or Europeans." [21]
Booker T. Washington concurs, "The Indians who first met the white man
on his continent do not seem to have held slaves until they first learned
to do so from him." [22]
The Cherokee atsi nahtsa'i, or "one who is owned," were individuals
captured or obtained through warfare with neighboring peoples and often
given to clans who lost members in warfare. [23]
To the extent that these individuals existed outside of the clan structure,
they were in essence "outsiders" who lived on the periphery of Cherokee
society. It was up to the clan-mothers, or "beloved women" of the Nation
to decide upon the fate of these individuals. [24]
If they accepted these "outsiders" as replacements for those individuals
who had lost their lives in battle, these individuals became members of
the clan and thus the nation. [25] If the "outsiders"
were not accepted into the clan, then they served as the "other" in promoting
clan self-understanding and solidarity. [26]
There was not a race-based understanding of "difference" within Native
American cultures as that which had come to exist within the European mind
over the hundred years following the discovery of the New World. Race as
an identifying component in interaction did not exist within the traditional
nations of the early Americas; into the nineteenth century the Cherokee
were noted for their cultural accommodation. [27]
William McLoughlin stressed the importance of clan relationships or larger
collective identities (e.g., Ani-Yunwiya, Ani-Tsalagi, Ani-Kituhwagi) within
indigenous nations as the critical components in their interactions with
outsiders; race was not considered a critical element in perception or
hostility. [28] In her pivotal work Slavery
and the Evolution of Cherokee Society 1540-1866, Theda Perdue states
that the Cherokee regarded Africans they encountered "simply as other human
beings," and, "since the concept of race did not exist among Indians and
since the Cherokees nearly always encountered Africans in the company of
Europeans, one supposes that the Cherokee equated the two and failed to
distinguish sharply between the races." [29]
Kenneth Wiggins Porter, an African American historian, concurs with this
conclusion: [we have] "no evidence that the northern Indian made any distinction
between Negro and white on the basis of skin color, at least, not in the
early period and when uninfluenced by white settlers." [30]
However, racism and religious intolerance were critical components in
the European dispossession and enslavement of Native Americans in the colonial
period. Originating in the Aristotelian concept of natural rights, the
concept of white supremacy as it developed in the sixteenth century ran
along these lines:
Those, therefore, who are as much inferior to others as are
the body to the soul and beasts to men, are by nature slaves. He is by
nature born slave who...shares in reason to the extent of apprehending
it without possessing it. [31]
Juan Gines De Sepulveda, in his disputation with Bartholomeo de las Casas
in Vallodolid in 1555, argued the superiority of the Spaniard to the indigenous
people:
In wisdom, skill, virtue and humanity, these people are as
inferior to the Spaniards as children are to adults and women to men; there
is a great a difference between savagery and forebearance, between violence
and moderation, almost -- I am inclined to say -- as between monkeys and
men. [32]
Las Casas, "Champion of the Indians," argued against this ideology by asserting:
Aristotle, farewell! From Christ, the eternal truth, we have
the commandment `You must love your neighbor as yourself.' Although he
was a profound philosopher, Aristotle was not worthy to be captured in
the chase so that he could come to God through knowledge of true faith."
[33]
...the natural rules and laws and rights of men are common to all nations,
Christians and gentile, and whatever their sect, law, state, color, and
condition, without and difference." [34]
Las Casas won the day in Valladolid, but the moral argument of Las Casas
was soon swept aside by a European continent facing a vast world with countless
treasures inhabited by a people who could, themselves, become a commodity
in the open market. [35]
What was originally the "black legend" of Spanish ethnocentrism and
genocidal cruelty spread quickly throughout Europe as political, economic,
and religious sentiment fueled colonial expansion. [36]
Though initially shocked by Sir John Hawkins' first slavery venture in
1562-1563, Queen Elizabeth quickly changed her mind, "not only did she
forgive him but she became a shareholder in his second slaving voyage."
[37]
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the traffic in slaves from Europe,
Africa, and the Americas became a mainstay of the colonial economic enterprise.
Behind the mercantile enterprise was a moral sanction of a pervasive ideology:
No slaughter was impermissible, no lie dishonorable, no breach
of trust shameful, if it advantaged the champions of true religion. In
the gradual transitions from religious conceptions to racial conceptions,
the gulf between persons calling themselves Christian and the other persons,
whom they called heathens, translated smoothly into the chasm between whites
and coloreds. The law of moral obligation sanctioned behavior on only one
side of that chasm... the Christian Caucasians of Europe are not only holy
and white but also civilized, while the pigmented heathens of distant
lands are not only idolatrous and dark but savage. Thus the absolutes
of predator and prey have been preserved, and the grandeur of invasion
and massacre has kept its sanguinary radiance. [38]
The Birth of a Nation
With the founding of Charleston in April 1670, England entered into
the commercial slave market in a manner that was to establish Charleston
as the center of the slave trade for two centuries. From the very beginning
of the colony in the late seventeenth century, the Carolinians cited Indian
"savagery" and "depredations" as justification for "Indian wars" against
the Yamasee, the Tuscarora, the Westo and eventually the Cherokee and the
Creek. [39] The term "Indian war" was quite
often simply a rhetorical exercise to cover not only the seizure of Native
American land and crops, but also the enslavement of the indigenous peoples
of the Americas. [40]
Charleston, and especially a group of men associated with an area north
of Charleston known as the "Goose Creek men," became the center of this
North American commercial slavery enterprise. Native American nations throughout
the South were played one against the other in an orgy of slave dealing
that decimated entire peoples; during the latter half of the seventeenth
century, Carolina was more active than any other colony in the exportation
of Indian slaves. [41] The Indian slave trade
in the Carolinas, with Charleston as its center, rapidly took on all of
the characteristics of the African slave trade. The Carolinians formed
alliances with coastal native groups, armed them, and encouraged them to
make war on weaker tribes deeper in the Carolina interior. [42]
By the late years of the seventeenth century, caravans of Indian slaves
were making their way from the Carolina backcountry to forts on the coast
just as they were doing on the African continent. Once in Charleston, the
captives were loaded on ships for the "middle passage" to the West Indies
or other colonies such as New Amsterdam or New England. [43]
Many of the Indian slaves were kept at home and worked on the plantations
of South Carolina; by 1708, the number of Indian slaves in the Carolinas
was nearly half that of African slaves. [44]
The slave traders of the Carolinas engaged in successful slaving among
the Westo, the Tuscarora, the Yamasee, and the Cherokee. Though history
may record these encounters as "Indian wars," the "wars" were simply Native
American responses to slaving operations of the English and their Shawnee
allies. In three years of slaving operations against the Westo Indians,
all but fifty of the Nation were reduced to slavery or killed. [45]
The English and the Shawnee reached far out into the Spanish empire in
the South; some 10,000 to 12,000 Timucuas, Guales, and Apalachees were
taken to Charleston and sold into slavery and shipped throughout the vast
English empire. When the Shawnees grew sick of their mercenary occupation
and dissolved their trading partnership with the English, Governor John
Archdale established a policy of "thinning the barbarous Indian natives."
By 1710, the Shawnees had gone the way of the Westo. [46]
When the Tuscarora Indians of North Carolina rebelled against being
driven from their land, they were met by a force of thirty English settlers
and five hundred Yamasee warriors led by Colonel John Barnwell. After King
Hancock of the Tuscarora signed a treaty, Barnwell and his men seized a
number of them as slaves. The Tuscarora considered this a breach of the
treaty and continued the war. In 1713, another group of settlers and one
thousand Indian allies led by Colonel James Moore, veteran of the Shawnee
slaving raids in Florida, routed the Tuscarora. The four hundred Tuscarora
who survived the battle were sold into slavery at ten pounds sterling each
to finance the campaign. [47]
In 1715, the Yamasee rebelled against British degradation, maltreatment,
and exploitation. The English had begun to seize Yamasee women and children
for the slave market in payment of debts that the Indians had assumed in
their relationship with the English. William Anews, missionary to the Mohawks
for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, reported to his superiors
that the English were "abusing the Indians with drink and then cheate them
in Trading with them and Stealing Even their Children away and carry them
off to other places and sell them for slaves." [48]
There is also evidence that the Yamasee had gotten a bit too friendly
with Spanish missionaries in Florida. Charles Craven, Governor of South
Carolina, organized the militia and set out against the Yamasee. Four hundred
Yamasee were either killed or taken to Charleston to be sold into slavery.
The Nation was almost exterminated; what survivors there were fled to Florida
to live among the Spanish missionaries. [49]
As early as 1693, the Cherokee had become objects of the slave trade
to the extent that a tribal delegation was sent to the Royal Governor of
South Carolina to protect the Cherokee from Congaree, Catawba, and Savannah
slave-catchers. [50] In 1705, the Cherokee accused
the colonial governor of granting "commissions" to slave-catchers to "set
upon, assault, kill, destroy, and take captive" Cherokee citizens to be
"sold into slavery for his and their profit." [51]
The Cherokee slave trade was so serious that it had, by this time, eclipsed
the trade for furs and skins and become the primary source of commerce
between the English and the people of South Carolina. [52]
In the early 1760's, the Cherokee Nation allied with the French against
the British in the French and Indian War. The Cherokee did so in exchange
for protection from their traditional enemies, the Iroquois and the Muskogee,
as well as their new found enemy, the British colonials. North Carolina,
in its provision for raising troops against the Cherokee, offered to anyone
who took captive "an enemy Indian" the right to hold them as a slave. [53]
The conflict lasted two years until an army of Carolina Rangers, British
light infantry, and Royal Scots set out against the Cherokee. In a scorched
earth policy through Cherokee territory, they decimated the people burning
crops and towns. The Cherokee finally agreed to a peace pact that ceded
the largest portion of their hereditary land to the English and established
a line of separation between whites and Cherokee. [54]
With the arrival of twenty "negars" aboard a Dutch man-of-war in Virginia
in 1619, the face of American slavery began to change from the "tawny"
Indian to the "blackamoor" African over a period of some one hundred years
between 1650 and 1750. [55] Though the issue
is complex, the unsuitability of the Native American for the labor intensive
agricultural practices, their susceptibility to European diseases, the
proximity of avenues of escape for Native Americans, and the lucrative
nature of the African slave trade led to a transition to an African based
institution of slavery. [56] In spite of a later
tendency in the Southern United States to differentiate the African slave
from the Indian, African slavery was in actuality imposed on top of a preexisting
system of Indian slavery. [57] In North America,
the two never diverged as distinctive institutions. [58]
During this transitional period, Africans and Native Americans shared
the common experience of enslavement. [59] In
addition to working together in the fields, they lived together in communal
living quarters, began to produce collective recipes for food and herbal
remedies, shared myths and legends, and ultimately intermarried. The intermarriage
of Africans and Native Americans was facilitated by the disproportionality
of African male slaves to females (3 to 1) and the decimation of Native
American males by disease, enslavement, and prolonged war against the colonists.
[60]
During the intertribal wars encouraged by the English in order to produce
slaves, the largest majority of those enslaved were women and children
in accordance with historic patterns among Native Americans. [61]
Therefore, the largest numbers of Native American slaves in the early Southeast
were women. Slave owners often desired African men paired with Native American
women to work the fields and to help around the house. John Norris, a South
Carolina planter estimated the costs of setting up a plantation:
Imprimis; Fifteen good Negro Men at 45 lb each 675 lb.
Item: Fifteen Indian Women to work in the Field
at 18 lb each, comes to 270 lb.
Item, Three Indian Women as cooks for the Slaves
and other Household Business 55 lb. [62]
As Native American societies in the Southeast were primarily matrilineal,
African males who married Native American women often became members of
the wife's clan and citizens of the respective nation. As relationships
grew, the lines of distinction began to blur and the evolution of red-black
people began to pursue its own course; many of the people known as slaves,
free people of color, Africans, or Indians were most often the product
of integrating cultures. [63] Among the people
of the Chickamagua region of the Cherokee Nation and those who spoke the
Kituwhan dialect, there was a particular "ethnic openness." The people
native to this region were "more receptive to racial diversity within their
towns than the mainstream Cherokees." [64]
In areas such as Southeastern Virginia, The "Low Country" of the Carolinas,
and around Galphintown [65] near Savannah, Georgia,
communities of Afro-Indians began to arise. The term "mustee" came to distinguish
between those who shared African and Native American ancestry from those
who were a mixture of European and African. Even after 1720, black and
red Carolinians continued to share slave quarters and intimate lives; many
wills continued to refer to "all my Slaves, whether Negroes, Indians, Mustees,
Or Molattoes." [66] The depth and complexity
of this intermixture are revealed in a 1740 slave code in South Carolina
that ruled that:
all negroes and Indians, (free Indians in amity with this government,
and negroes, mulattoes, and mustezoes, who are now free, excepted) mulattoes
or mustezoes who are now, or shall hereafter be in this province, and all
their issue and offspring...shall be and they are hereby declared to be,
and remain hereafter absolute slaves. [67]
Increasingly toward the end of the century, Africans began to flee slavery
in larger numbers to settle among the Indians in their immediate vicinity
and in so doing became mediums of exchange for the dominant culture. At
the same time, Africans who had absorbed Native American languages and
culture brought them to Europeans. Apart from their collective exploitation
at the hands of colonial slavery, Africans and Native Americans possessed
similar worldviews rooted in their historic relationship to the subtropical
coastlands of the middle Atlantic. [68] Considering
historic circumstances, environmental associations, and metaphysical affiliations,
the relationships among African Americans and Native Americans was much
more extensive and enduring than most colonial or contemporary observers
acknowledged.
In the middle to latter part of the eighteenth century, white colonists
began to recognize that, especially in areas such as South Carolina and
Georgia where Africans and Indians outnumbered whites 4 to 1, a great need
existed "to make Indians & Negro's a checque upon each other least
by their Vastly Superior Numbers, we should be crushed by one or the other."
[69]
In 1775, John Stuart, a senior British official, complained "nothing can
be more alarming to the Carolinians then the idea of an attack from Indians
and Negroes;" he further believed that "any intercourse between Indians
and Negroes in my opinion ought to be prevented as much as possible." [70]
William Willis, in his "Divide and Rule: Red, White, and Black in the Southeast,"
believed that one of the main reasons that Indian slavery was curtailed
in the colonies was related to white fears of an alliance between Native
Americans and African immigrants. [71]
The colonists' fears were not without basis; Native Americans and Africans
had begun to form alliances and pathways to Native America were followed
by African runaways. [72] Nearby maroon communities,
as well as Indians and Blacks from Spanish territory, harassed isolated
settlers; the threat of violence became real as slave revolts spread throughout
the Carolina frontier. [73] Though the Stono
rebellion of 1739 is described as a "slave revolt," there is little doubt
that many of those enslaved at Stono were Native Americans; the very name
Stono itself comes from a Native American nation enslaved by the Carolinians.
[74]
A 1759 insurrection plot, which included which included the Cherokee
and Creek, was inspired by Philip Johns, a free mulatto, who carried a
peculiar note:
a written paper and charged them to carry it to all Negroes
and show it to them...[which said] that the 17th day of June was fixed
upon for killing the Buckraas, but afterwards told him that it was agreed
to wait til the corn was turn'd down and the Indians were then to be sent
to and they would come and assist in killing all Buckraas [75]
In 1768, a revolt occurred near Charleston led by "a numerous collection
of outcast mulattoes, mustees, and free negroes." [76]
Various mechanisms began to be developed throughout the colonies that
served to differentiate between African and Native Americans. Thomas Jefferson
articulated this difference in his Notes on the State of Virginia when
he said that the Indian was a "noble savage" that "civilization" might
save, but that the African was an inferior creature being suitable only
for service. [77] South Carolina Governor James
Glen believed that white security depended upon creating hatred between
the races, as "it has always been the policy of this govert to creat an
aversion in them [Indians] to Negroes." [78]
By 1721, most Native Americans were prohibited from entry into English
settlements; within the next ten years persons taking Africans into Native
American territory were fined the sum of one hundred pounds. [79]
The colonies passed miscegenation laws that forbade the intermarriage
of people from different races such as the one from Virginia listed above.
A similar law from North Carolina bade that anyone who married with "an
Indian, Negro, mustee, or mulatto man or woman, or any person of mixed
blood, to the third generation" be fined fifty pounds. [80]
Slave codes began to distinguish among the people; from North Carolina
came the curious language of "free persons of color" that arose to define
a whole class of people who lay on the periphery of the racial constructs
of early America. [81]
The colonists used African slaves against "indian uprisings" and they
served extensively with the South Carolinians in their wars with the Yamasee,
the Spanish in Florida, and the Cherokee. [82]
Native Americans agents quelled slave revolts such as the Stono, and the
Carolinians offered bounties to Native Americans for catching and returning
runaway slaves. [83] The policy of fostering
hatred among the races became an enduring element in the relationships
among the varied peoples of the South; it was codified by the Virginia
Supreme Court in 1814 when it made provisions related to the natural rights
of white persons and Native Americans, "but entirely disapproving, thereof,
so far as the same relates to native Africans and their descendants." [84]
The line was drawn in the sand. Native Americans came to understand
that there was, indeed, a profound chasm between themselves and the Europeans
who had come to live among them. They also came to understand that the
European not only saw himself as different from the Native American, but
distinctively different from the African that they had brought with them
and placed in servitude. Being themselves enslaved and then seeing others
enslaved, the Cherokee Nation came to understand the concept of "natural
rights" as it extended to all people of color:
Let us examine the facts of your present eruption into our
country, and we shall discover your pretentions on that ground. What did
you do? You marched into our territories...you killed a few scattered and
defenseless individuals, spread fire and desolation whereever you pleased
and returned again to your own habitations... Again, were we to inquire
by what law or authority you set up your claim, I answer, none!Your laws
extend not into our country, nor ever did. You talk of the law of nature
and the law of nations and they are both against you.
Indeed, much has been advanced on what you term civilization among the
Indians; and many proposals have been made to make us adopt your laws,
your religion, your manners and your customs. But, we confess that we do
not yet see the propriety, or practicability, of such a reformation, and
should be better pleased with beholding the good effects of these doctrines
in your own practices than with hearing you talk about them...The great
God of Nature has placed us in different situations. It is true that he
has endowed you with many superior advantages; but he has not created us
to be your slaves. [85]
The First Awakening
John Marrant, a free African minister, was the first Protestant missionary
to the Cherokee Nation. Marrant was converted by the preaching of George
Whitefield in Charleston in 1769 and dedicated his life to the study of
the gospel and to the Christian mission. After his family rejected his
Christian mission to them "as to threaten my life," [86]
Marrant fled to the woods of South Carolina and eventually ended up with
a Cherokee hunter. Learning to speak the Cherokee language, Marrant adopted
many of the social and cultural patterns of the Cherokee.
When he was captured by a larger group of Cherokee and threatened with
death by the Cherokee king, he witnessed to the Cherokee in their native
tongue:
I cried again, and He was entreated. He said, "Be it as thou
wilt;" the Lord appeared most lovely and glorious; the king himself was
awakened, and the others set at liberty. A great change took place among
the people; the King's house became God's house; the soldiers were ordered
away; and the poor condemned prisoner had perfect liberty and was treated
like a prince. Now the Lord made all my enemies become my great friends.
[87]
After remaining with the Cherokee for two months, Marrant set about upon
a mission to the Creek (five weeks), Catawar, and Housaw (seven weeks).
He did not find these missions to be successful, so he returned to the
Cherokee for another two months. [88] After
spending such time in his mission to the Native Americans, Marrant returned
to his family who took him for a savage and did not recognize him. [89]
Marrant's "captivity narrative" became one of the most popular of its
genre in the post-Revolutionary period and provides a critical reflection
on race and religion in colonial America. The story of his life among the
Cherokee is proved to be one of the enduring stories of colonial history
and a critical text in African American literature. [90]
Marrant went on to be ordained by Reverend Lemuel Haynes, a prominent member
of the African American community. He served in the Revolutionary War [91]
and became the Chaplain of Prince Hall Grand Lodge Free and Accepted Masons
in Boston.
Prince Hall Freemasonry is one of the fundamental independent Black
institutions in the United States and has proven to be the training grounds
of a huge cadre of African American leaders. The organization was founded
in 1775 by Prince Hall, a former slave and "person of color" from Barbados,
who believed that all possessed "a natural and unalienable right to that
freedom that the great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on
all mankind." [92] Toward that end, Hall petitioned
the government of Massachusetts for the abolition of slavery in 1777; the
slave trade was abolished in Boston in 1788 due to the work of an interracial
group led by Prince Hall.
In 1782, Hall petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to establish
an African colony that was to become the modern African state of Liberia.
Hall again petitioned the legislature for the education of colored children
and founded such a school in 1796. In the same year he founded the African
Benevolent Society to help "persons of color" to become worthy, self-supporting
citizens. [93] However, it was to be Free African
Lodge #459 (formally organized in 1787) which was to be the focal point
of a struggle for civil rights that continues to this day. [94]
Early members of Prince Hall were ministers Jupiter Hammon, Richard
Allen and Absolum Jones, the latter being founders of the Free African
Society and leaders of the independent black church movement. Members of
Free African Lodge #459 of Prince Hall Freemasonry formed a part of the
funeral procession of President George Washington, one of the most famous
of Masonic presidents. [95] The alliance between
Prince Hall Freemasonry and African-American church life is a critical
but often unexplored factor in the African American religious experience.
[96]
The fascinating struggle for recognition and dignity of African Americans
within Freemasonry parallels that of the larger struggle for human rights
that has occurred within the political and social systems within the United
States. [97]
The Massachusetts Bay Colony in those early days resembled Charleston
in many ways and the connections between Massachusetts and South Carolina
are more than just spurious. Many of the Native Americans enslaved in the
lower colonies were shipped to New England; Native Americans enslaved following
King Philip's war were shipped South to the Carolinas and to the Islands.
There were so many Southern slaves imported into the colony that, in 1712,
the colony passed a law prohibiting the importation of Indian slaves; [98]
the system in Massachusetts in 1765 closely resembled that in South Carolina
a generation earlier. The Native American women were kept in the colony
and male African slaves imported to assume the harder tasks of field work.
Many slaves very early learned to take refuge among Native Americans
and many of the Native American communities had strong African American
components. [99] Though we have come to understand
that there were "red puritans" in New England, we have to understand that
not only were there were also black ones but also "black Indians." [100]
Just as there were slave revolts in the Southern colonies, Blacks and Indians
in Massachusetts also conspired together and committed numerous "depredations"
against their white puritan brothers. [101]
Prince Hall, being a "free person of color," could not have failed to
be aware of the ramifications of slavery not just upon persons of African
descent but upon all those enslaved including Indians. Phyllis Wheatley,
a contemporary of Marrant and Hall, corresponded with Native American minister
Samsom Occom on the subject of the "Love of Freedom," "the glorious dispensation
of civil and religious Liberty, which are so inseparably united, that there
is little or no Enjoyment of one without the other." [102]
The American struggle for liberty that began in the meeting places, churches,
and lodges of New England in the wake of the First Great Awakening was
not soon forgotten. The role of religious figures, as well as that of Freemasons,
in the struggle against the institution of slavery would carry forward
into the next century where it would lead to a dramatic confrontation over
the issue.
Civilization and Its Discontents
Marrant's missionary work among the Cherokee and his efforts among them,
as opposed to the "less savingly wrought upon" nations farther in the interior,
proved that the Cherokee were to hold a special place in the heart of the
European colonist. The popularity of Marrant's "captivity narrative" in
the post-Revolutionary era made the Cherokee accessible and showed the
possibilities that such a people might be brought to the forefront of civilization.
The Cherokee were thus singled out for "civilization" and "salvation" in
a manner unlike any other indigenous people in the Americas; the costs
of such a special place in the American's hearts were to be quite dear
for the Cherokee Nation.
When many of the Native American nations such as the Cherokee aligned
themselves with the British during the Revolutionary War, it provided an
even further rationale for the dispossession and dislocation of the indigenous
nations. Following the Revolutionary War, and with the settlement of hostilities
with the Cherokee Nation at the end of the eighteenth century, the newly
established government inaugurated its "program to promote civilization
among the friendly Indian tribes" which "furnished them with useful domestic
animals, and implements of husbandry." [103]
A critical element in the civilization program was the shift from a subsistence
based agricultural system to a plantation based labor intensive farming
system.
Cherokee society at the time of European contact bore a striking similarity
to that of the Iroquoian society further north with respect to agricultural
practices and gender-based roles within society. The world divided into
the complimentary roles of forest and clearing. The former became the domain
of men as hunters and warriors; the latter was the domain of women as farmers
and clan matrons. [104] Cherokee society was
matrilineal and matrilocal; women held the property including the dwelling
and the garden and maintained the economic system rooted in non-invasive
agriculture. [105] There were communal fields
and clan gardens that worked with a hoe and dibble stick; surplus grain
and vegetables were stored in a communal reserve from which all could draw
when needed and in private granaries. The Cherokee forsook the plow until
the nineteenth century because they believed that it would lead to a technological
unemployment and starvation for those unable to compete in a market economy.
[106]
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, most Americans believed
that the conquered nations of the Southeast had little choice but to give
up the vast tracts of lands they claimed to possess and settle on the security
of small farms and a settled agricultural lifestyle. The federal government
under the auspices of Secretary of War Henry Knox (a Freemason) set about
a policy designed to make farmers of the former woodsmen and assimilate
them into white society. [107] The Treaty of
Holston, signed July 2, 1791, stated:
That the Cherokee nation may be led to a greater degree of
civilization, and to become herdsman and cultivators, instead of remaining
in a state of hunters, the United States will, from time to time, furnish
gratuitously the said nation with the implements of husbandry. [108]
However, this dramatic shift in the culture of the peoples of the Southeast
could not be accommodated without first altering the entire social, political,
and religious structures of traditional societies. [109]
Toward this end, the missionaries of the Christian churches proved quite
effective.
From the very beginning of United State's policy toward the Indians,
missionaries (often acting as government agents) were to play a critical
role in the civilization/christianization of the Cherokee Nation of the
Southeastern United States. The Indian policy of George Washington, a prominent
American Freemason, stated that "missionaries of excellent moral character
should be appointed to reside in their nation who should be well supplied
with all the implements of husbandry and the necessary stock for a model
farm."
[110] It went further: "It is particularly
important that something of this nature should be attempted with the Southern
nations of Indians, whose confined situation might render them proper subjects
for the experiment." [111] Thomas Jefferson
increased the investment of the federal government in Indian agriculture
believing that farmers could become good Christians, while hunters were
"unfavorable to the regular exercise of some duties essential to the Christian
character." [112]
The missionaries and government agents, believing that a stable society
promoted both a self-sustaining church and orderly civil government, introduced
white agricultural practices to the Indians by giving plows, livestock,
and gristmills to the men and cloth and spinning tools to the women. For
many of the Cherokee who had been slaves on colonial plantations and introduced
to European agricultural methods through this practice, the transition
was not difficult. [113] The missionaries also
provided agricultural instruction to the men and homemaking skills to the
women; the children were encouraged and educated by the missionaries to
assume gender roles complementary to white society. [114]
With the establishment of the first model farms and missions among the
Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeastern United States, a key tool used
in this civilization process was the implementation of African slaves as
laborers in the building and operation of the model farms and missions.
[115]
The missionaries, however, saw the issue of slavery as a political one
and not a question to which they were bound to respond to religiously.
Besides, as the missionaries were quick to point out, it was not their
fault:
Some have supposed that it had its origin among the Cherokees
no farther back than the Revolutionary War; when a large number of tories,
holding slaves, fled from the Southern States, and took refuge among this
people...And it is not unlikely that the evil began with white men, who
settled in the nation, and married Cherokee women... All accounts agree,
however, that it was introduced by white men. [116]
The first missionaries among the Cherokee were the Moravians Abraham Steiner
and Frederick C. De Schweinitz. In an earlier visit to the Cherokee, they
were pleased to see "negro slaves that were well clothed; bright, lovely
and appeared to be happy and well cared for." [117]
The Moravians used slave labor "leased" from James Vann, a wealthy mixed
blood trader, to build their mission. [118]
The mission to the Cherokee was not successful because the Moravians could
not speak Cherokee. They attracted largely the black members of the Nation
who were bilingual. However, because the Moravians did not consider the
Africans to be worthy of church admission, they offered them "special seats"
at communion and gave them the cup "last of all." [119]
In ignoring the historic cultural relationship between the Africans and
the Cherokees, the missionaries tossed away their greatest opportunity
for transmitting their message to a larger Cherokee audience and doomed
their missions to failure.
With the founding of the American Board for Foreign and Christian Missions
in 1810, Henry Knox's vision from a generation earlier finally had the
instrument to achieve its goals in President James Madison's "Civilization
Fund." [120] In 1817, the American Board sent
Cyrus Kingsbury to begin a system of missions among the Cherokee. With
the encouragement of a young Cherokee named John Ross and a Tennessee friend
of the Cherokee, General Andrew Jackson, [121]
he was able to secure permission from the Cherokee Council and built Brainerd
Mission in Tennessee and Eliot Mission in Georgia.
Andrew Jackson's 1818 dictate, "put into their children the primer and
the hoe, and they will naturally, in time, take hold of the plow; and,
as their minds become enlightened and expand, the Bible will be their book,
and they will grow in habits of morality and industry," [122]
was slowly coming into fruition. By 1820, the missions among the Five Nations
were among the most successful in the country; conversions were numerous
and the Southeastern Nations themselves were considered to be Christian.
[123]
Many of the members of the finest of Cherokee families such as the Ridges,
the Boudinots, and the Waties were educated in the missions in the South
as well as at Cornwall, Connecticut.
[124]
Farms grew into plantations and buildings grew into towns. As the program
of civilization pursued its goals, slavery spread among the nations of
the Southeast. Individuals who held positions of power and land began to
grow wealthy and to buy black slaves to extend their fields and tend to
their livestock. Intermarriage among the Nations and the whites who served
among them increased; mixed-blood natives who spoke English began to adopt
the social and cultural patterns of the missionaries and white farmers
who surrounded them. [125] Gradually the Southeastern
Nations developed an landed elite and a small group of shopkeepers and
entrepreneurs formed a bourgeois element who became dominant in national
affairs. It was among this group of the rich and powerful, the assimilated
peoples of the Five Nations, that slavery became most accepted. [126]
Among the people, William Bartram noted their progress towards civilization,
" If adopting and imitating the manners and customs of white people is
to be termed civilization, perhaps the Cherokees have made the greatest
advance." [127]
The missionaries did not, themselves, own slaves except "with a view
towards emancipation" and only used slaves rented or borrowed from Native
American slave owners. However, they were reticent to preach against the
evil of slavery among their practitioners in the Five Nations. [128]
The missionaries were not averse to preaching to the African slaves who
were among their most eager and willing converts and often translated the
gospel to the Cherokee. [129] However, the
missionaries kept their teachings within a tight boundary of accepted teaching
on the issue of slavery: Titus 2:9-10; 1st Timothy 6:1-5; Ephesians 6:5-9;
Colossians 3:22-24; and 1st Peter 2:17-20. [130]
In order to accommodate slavery, the missionaries began to teach an interesting
message concerning the origins of humanity that began to influence Cherokee
mythology. A new creation myth arose among the Cherokee that spoke of a
common origin but a specific curse upon the black race, which meant "that
the negro must work for the red and white man, and it has been so ever
since." [131]
Most missionaries believed that the most important goal was to first
convert the heathen, then attempt to deal with the "sin" of slavery. [132]
Many of their most ardent supporters were slave owners and they knew that
the local governments and federal agents would oppose them should they
choose to espouse the cause of abolition. In fact, some government agents
attributed the progress made by the Five Civilized Tribes to the growth
of the practice of slavery among them; one such agent stated, "I am clearly
of the opinion that the rapid advancement of the Cherokees is owing in
part to the fact of their being slave holders." [133]
In addition, their governing boards in the North did not want to jeopardize
contributions from wealthy persons who disliked abolition. [134]
Selah B. Treat appealed to the Northern board to understand the Southern
predicament in his Report to the Commissioners of the American Board for
Foreign and Christian Missions:
In defence of their policy in this respect, past and present,
they make their appeal, first of all, to the Bible, as showing the only
condition of church membership. This, they say, is evidence of a change
of heart; and when such evidence is furnished, there is no law for excluding
the candidate from the privileges of Christ's house. They also say, that
the adoption of a different rule in regard to slaveholders would have been
fatal to the prosperity of the mission. And they are confident, should
they now determine to subject this portion of the community to a new test,
that their usefulness would at once come to an end. [135]
The missionaries, and especially those of the American Board, established
a basic position of neutrality and as the Bible did not explicitly condemn
slavery, they accepted "all to our communion who give evidence that they
love the Lord Jesus Christ." [136]
However, several dynamic phenomena were to draw many of the missionaries
away from their positions of neutrality and cast the Five Civilized Tribes
into a cauldron that would have devastating effects upon the Southeastern
Nations for the next hundred years. The first was a decisive split that
occurred within the Nations as to those who pursued the path of assimilation,
commonly referred to as "progressives," and those who clung to traditional
religious, social, and political values, i.e., the "conservatives." [137]
Especially in the light of a pan-Indian religious awakening inspired by
Tecumseh, a Freemason, [138] and his brother
Tenskwatawa that spread among the nations in the East in the early nineteenth
century, many of the full blooded members of the Southeastern Nations rebelled
against assimilation by reasserting the traditional methods of living.
[139]
This left little room for colonial institutions, including slavery, among
large populations of the of full-blooded members of the Southeastern Nations
who did not adopt plantation agriculture and mercantile capitalism.
In addition, there were splits among the various nations according to
the level of assimilation to white population, adoption of European culture,
and intermarriage among Europeans and the peoples of the First Nations.
Even within the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, Nations such as the Choctaw,
Chickasaw, and especially the Cherokee intermarried with the white missionaries,
government agents, and local settlers while the Muscogean people of the
deep South did not. A joke developed among the Southeastern nations that
highlighted the dominant facet of this cultural interaction: "A Creek said
to a Cherokee...`You Cherokees are so mixed with whites we cannot tell
you from the whites.' The Cherokee...replied: `You Creeks are so mixed
with the Negroes we cannot tell you from the Negroes.' " [140]
From the earliest periods of the institution of slavery and well into
the nineteenth century, African slaves had been fleeing slavery and repression
along the same routes that their native forebears had used in earlier times.
[141]
As historian and Member of Congress Joshua Giddings described it a hundred
years later, it was rite of passage:
The efforts of the Carolinians to enslave the Indians, brought
with them the natural and appropriate penalties. The Indians began to make
their escape from slavery to the Indian Country. Their example was soon
followed by the African Slaves, who also fled to the Indian Country, and,
in order to secure themselves from pursuit continued their journey. [142]
As a result of intermarriage between Africans and Indians during their
collective enslavement, many Native American escapees would return to their
former plantations to free their spouses and children still held in captivity.
As Michael Roethler puts it in his essay Negro Slavery Among the Cherokee
Indians 1540-1866, the Cherokee considered it "just retribution" that
they who had been enslaved helped those enslaved to flee their persecutors
in the Carolinas. [143]
The Muskogee, and especially the Seminoles (a corruption of the Spanish
word cimarron meaning runaway or maroon) [144]
of Florida, accepted these African American runaways and incorporated them
into their nations because the Africans were well-skilled in languages,
agriculture, technical skills, and warfare. [145]
Just as the "underground railroad" provided freedom in the North in later
years, this underground railroad ran to the South and "freedom on the border"
as historian Kevin Mulroy phrases it in his 1993 work on the Seminole Maroons
in Florida. [146]
The Muskogees and the Seminoles granted the Africans much greater freedom,
even when they were referred to as "slaves." [147]
Africans among the Muskogees could own property, travel freely from town
to town, and marry into the family of their "owner." Often, the children
of a Muskogee's African American slaves were free, and often African American
Muskogees became traditional leaders among the people or even a chief.
[148]
Among the Seminoles, there was even greater freedom. The blacks lived set
apart to themselves, managing their own stocks and crops, paying only tributes
to their "owners." The Africans could own property, moved about with freedom,
and allowed to arm themselves. [149] According
to contemporary sources, the Seminoles "would almost sooner sell his child
as his slave," [150] and that "there exists
a law among Seminoles, forbidding individuals from selling their negroes
to white people." [151]
The Africans were more than just the laborers and technicians for the
Muskogee and Seminole; they became their diplomats, their warriors, and
interestingly enough, some became their religious leaders. A prophetic
Christianity had spread among African Americans, witnessed by Francis LeJau
as early as 1710, [152] in areas such as Goose
Creek and Silver Bluff, South Carolina. In these areas as in many areas
throughout the South, the Creeks were continually exposed to an apocalyptic
religious tradition that promoted resistance to white oppression. [153]
On the frontier, there were constant rumblings of insurrections by black
Christians and blacks and Indians coming up from Florida to attack planters,
"to rob and plunder us," and to capture (rescue) enslaved Africans. [154]
Calvin Martin, in his work Sacred Revolt, posits that African American
prophetic Christianity may have contributed to the emergence of the "Redstick"
prophetic movement among the Creeks in the early nineteenth century, "for
at the heart of African American Christianity was a spiritually inspired
critical view of Anglo-American civilization." [155]
One such religious leader in the "Redstick" rebellion was the "Prophet
Abraham" (Souanakke Tustenukke), a West African slave who had fled south
to Florida. He served as both war leader and interpreter for the maroon
community at Fort Negro, Florida. Throughout the Southeastern United States,
there existed independent as well as integrated Afro-Indian communities
led by African and mixed-blood religio/political leaders such as Asi Yahola
(Osceola), Black Factor, Luis Pacheco, Mulatto King, and Chief Wildcat.
[156]
Kenneth Wiggins Porter described the presence of Africans in Florida:
But not only were there chiefs of mixed Indian and Negro Blood
among the Seminoles, and free negroes acting as principal counselors and
war-captains, but...the position of the very slaves was so influential
that the Seminole nation might present to students of political science
an interesting and perhaps almost unique example of a very close approach
to a doulocracy, or government by slaves. [157]
The presence of such refuges and spiritual centers so close to colonial
plantations, especially in the light of slave rebellions in Haiti and the
colonies, proved to be a great threat to the institution of slavery. [158]
General Andrew Jackson, believing the settlements to be established by
"villains for the purpose of rapine and plunder," attempted to destroy
them in the First and Second Creek War. As Congressman Joshua Giddings
noted, there was but one effort in Jackson's war, "the bloody Seminole
War (sic) of 1816-17 and 18 arose from the efforts of our government to
sustain the interests of slavery, or that our troops were employed to murder
women and children because their ancestors had once been held bondage,
and to seize and carry back to toil and suffering those who had escaped
death." [159] Those "stolen negroes," not killed
or returned to the English colonies, fled deeper into the South. [160]
It is important to note at this point that Africans and mixed bloods
were not just religious leaders among the "exile" communities of Muskogees
and Seminoles, the same also existed within the communities of the more
"civilized" nations of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw. Most of the
early records of the missionaries note that among their earliest converts
were the enslaved African Americans that existed in Native American communities.
[161]
Among the most successful of the early missions to the South was that of
Reverend Samuel Thomas of Goose Creek Parish of South Carolina, whose twenty
black interpreters helped him with his church of nearly one thousand communicants.
[162]
Records from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in South
Carolina repeatedly mention the membership of their early missions and
churches as being equally mixed with "negro and indian slaves." The records
also state that the S.P.G. had no qualms about baptizing "the heathen slaves
also (Indians and negroes)." [163] However,
many of their owners had some problems with that thought:
If the masters were but good Christians themselves and would
concure with the Ministers, we should have good hopes of the conversion
and salvation at least of some of their Negro and Indian slaves. But too
many of them rather oppose than concurr with us and are angry with us.
[164]
Even as late as 1818, the missionaries referred to their "Sabbath schools"
as "our Black Schools," because of the presence of Africans as both students
and teachers. [165] As few missionaries spoke
the native languages, the Africans played an intermediary role as teacher
and (of necessity) preacher. [166] Many of
the earliest black ministers in the missions of the Baptist Church were
former river-cult priests sold into slavery in great numbers; [167]
it is important to note that the river-cult and ritual bathing were important
components in traditional Cherokee religion. [168]
One of the most fascinating accounts of the presence of the African
presence in the early Native American church comes from Cornelia Pelham,
an 1821 visitor to a mission in the Choctaw nation:
About two thirds of the members of the church are of African
descent; these mostly understand English; and on that account are more
accessible than the Chickasaws. The last mentioned class manifest an increasing
attention to the means of grace, and since the commencement of the present
k,year, more of the full Indians have been constant in their attendance
upon religious meetings, than at any time since the mission was established.
The black people manifest the most ardent desire for religious instruction,
and often travel a great many miles to obtain it...Two or three years ago,
a black man who belonged to the mission church, opened his little cabin
for prayer, on the evening of every Wednesday, which was usually attended
by half a dozen colored persons. This spring, the number suddenly increased,
till more than fifty assembled at once, many of whom were full Indians.
The meetings, were conducted wholly by Christian slaves, in the Chickasaw
language. One of their number can read fluently in the Bible, and many
of the others can sing hymns which they have committed to memory from hearing
them sung and recited. [169]
In August 1818, a fullblood Cherokee seeking dmission to the Chickamauga
mission was found "able to spell correctly in words of 4 & 5 letters.
He had been taught solely by black people who had received their instruction
in our Sunday School." [170]
Within the cultural nexus of the integrated community of the early American
frontier, a unique synthesis grew in which African and Native American
people shared a common religious experience. [171]
Not only did Africans share with Native Americans, the process of sharing
cultural traditions went both ways. From the slave narratives, we learn
of the role that Native American religious traditions played in African
American society:
Dat busk was justa little busk. Dey wasn't enough men around
to have a good one. But I seen lots of big ones. Ones where dey all had
de different kinds of "banga." Dey call all de dances some kind of banga.
De chicken dance is de "Tolosabanga", and de Istifanibanga is de one whar
dey make lak dey is skeletons and raw heads coming to git you. De "Hadjobanga"
is de crazy dance, and dat is a funny one. Dey all dance crazy and make
up funny songs to go wid de dance. Everybody think up funny songs to sing
and everybody whoop and laugh all de time. [172]
When I wuz a boy, dere wuz lotsa Indians livin' about six miles frum
the plantation on which I wuz a slave. De Indians allus held a big dance
ever' few months, an' all de niggers would try to attend. On one ob dese
ostent'tious occasions about 50 of us niggers conceived de idea of goin',
without gettin permits frum de master. As soon as it gets dark, we quietly
slips outen de quarters, one by one, so as not to disturb de guards. Arrivin
at de dance, we jined in the festivities wid a will. Late dat nite one
ob de boys wuz goin down to de spring fo de get a drink ob water when he
notice somethin' movin in de bushes. Gettin up closah, he look' agin when-lawd
hab mersy! Patty rollers! [173]
I was an Indian doctor when I was grown and when an Indian would get
sick he would send for me. I would always go and see the sick Indian, if
this sick Indian as a real sick fellow. The Choctaw tribe in those days
called their sick spells after some of the animals that roamed the woods
and some of the fowls. [174]
Slaves "mixed and mingled and danced together with the Indians. The indigenous
people of the Five Nations welcomed new dances including those from their
African counterparts. [175] Sacred bonds of
blood and metaphysical kinship came to exist between the two peoples and
the "history written in the hearts of our people" became manifest. [176]
Native Americans also played roles in the development of the African
churches through supporting the "invisible institution." The "hush harbors"
or brush arbors, which were hastily constructed "churches" made of a lean-to
of tree limbs and branches, had been a prominent part of the Southeastern
traditional religion. The brush arbor architecture that became a critical
part of the "camp-meetings" of the religious revivals of the Second Great
Awakening was borrowed from the architecture of the "stomp ground" of Southeastern
traditional religious practices. Native Americans often supported the "invisible
institution:"
Master Frank wasn't no Christian but he would help build brush
arbors fer us to have church under and we sho would have big meetings I'll
tell you. One day Master Frank was going through the woods close to where
niggers was having church. All of a sudden he started running and beating
hisself and hollering and the niggers all went to shouting and saying "Thank
the Lawd, Master Frank ha done come through!" Master Frank after a minute
say,"Yea, through the worst of 'em." He had run into a yellow jacket's
nest. [177]
Interestingly enough, the first "Negro Baptist Church" was established
in what was colloquially known as "Galphintown" near Silver Bluff, South
Carolina. This place was at the beginning of the nineteenth century a center
for trade with the Five Nations. [178] George
Galphin, the owner of the settlement, was a gregarious Irishman who had
at least four wives including Metawney, the daughter of a Creek headman
and two Africans, the "Negro Sappho" and the "Negro Mina." [179]
The area around the "Negro Baptist Church" was a region in the eighteenth
century where the three races converged; members of Galphin's family were
patrons of the Negro Baptist Church at Silver Bluff. [180]
Jesse (Peter) Galphin was one of the founders of the Silver Bluff Baptist
Church and revived the church following the Revolutionary War. [181]
When the Revolutionary War threatened the congregation of the isolated
Negro Baptist Church in Silver Bluff, David George, the pastor, and fifty
members of the congregation fled to Savannah. David George, a slave of
George Galphin, was acquired from the Creek Nation to whom he had fled
following brutal treatment by a white slave owner in Nottoway, Virginia.
[182]
According to Michel Sobel, David George had lived among the Creek and Natchez
people as a "well-treated chattel servant" for many years. [183]
In 1782 when the British abandoned Savannah, David George fled to Nova
Scotia, Canada.
[184] George finally settled
in Sierra Leone in West Africa as part of Granville Sharp's recolonization
movement. [185]
Among the first ministers of the First African Baptist Church of Savannah
was a former slave by the name of Henry Francis, a minister ordained by
the Silver Bluff Baptist Church. Though a slave and considered a "black
pastor" [186] of the Third African Baptist
Church, Henry Francis had no known African ancestry. [187]
Andrew Bryan, pioneer Black Baptist, spoke of the importance of this "black
pastor" in a letter to authorities in 1800:
Another dispensation of Providence has much strengthened our
hands, and increased our means of information; Henry Francis, lately a
slave to the widow of the late Colonel Leroy Hammond, of Augusta, has been
purchased by a few humane gentlemen of this place, and liberated to exercise
the handsome ministerial gifts he possesses amongst us, and teach our youth
to read and write. He is a strong man about forty-nine years of age, whose
mother was white and whose father was an Indian. His wife and only son
are slaves. Brother Francis has been in the ministry fifteen years, and
will soon receive ordination, and will probably become the pastor of a
branch of my large church...it will take the rank and title of the 3rd
Baptist Church of Savannah. [188]
A "close neighborly feeling" [189] existed
between the Indigenous peoples of the South and the African freed persons,
slaves, and mixed-blood citizens within their midst. Even as slave owners,
the Native Americans were particularly noted for their kindness and refusal
to implement even their own national laws with respect to slavery. [190]
According to one Southern visitor to the Nation, "The Indian masters treated
their slaves with great liberality and upon terms approaching perfect equality,
with the exception that the owner of the slave generally does more work
than the slave himself." [191] Among the nations
of the Southeastern Indians, the slaves themselves noted the differences:
We all live around on them little farms, and we didn't have
to be under any overseer like the Cherokee Negroes had lots of times. We
didn't have to work if there wasn't no work to do...Old Chief (Rolley MacIntosh)
treated all the Negroes like they was just hired hands, and I was a big
girl before I knowed very much about belonging to him. [192]
Even within a particular Nation, there was great variation; New Thompson
noted that among the Cherokee, "the only negroes that have to work hard
were the ones who belonged to the half-breeds. As the Indian didn't do
work he didn't expect his slaves to do much work." [193]
Within the conservative elements of the Five Nations, more than just a
"close neighborly feeling" existed. Cudjo, the slave of Chief Yonaguska
[194]
of North Carolina, described their relationship: "He never allowed himself
to be called `master,' for he said Cudjo was his brother, and not his slave."
[195]
In 1821, the Baptist minister Evan Jones came to work as a missionary
among the full bloods in the valley towns of Western North Carolina and
Eastern Tennessee. [196] Jones and his family
began their mission work with Baptist missionary Humphrey Posey in the
mountainous Valley Towns near the Hiwassee River in Western North Carolina.
Among these conservative full-blood Cherokee, the old religion and the
old ways of living were very strong. Out of this community came a new breed
of Cherokee ministers such as Jesse Bushyhead, John Timson, and Kaneeka
(John Wickliffe). These native Baptist ministers, fluent in Cherokee and
often uneducated in the European sense, fused the evangelical zeal of Baptist
preaching, reliance on musical inspiration, and camp-meetings with traditional
methods of oratory, song, and brush arbor councils to create a prophetic
ministry similar to the "invisible institution." These native ministers
preached to a poorer class of Cherokee society who owned little or no slaves
and were poorly assimilated into the "dominant culture;" there were great
affinities between the Baptist mission to the full-bloods and to the transplanted
African. [197] The mission of Evan Jones among
the full bloods of North Carolina was to play a critical link in the history
of the Cherokee Nation.
The mountains of the Carolinas and Tennessee were settled by a different
breed of people than those who settled in the lowlands where slavery was
adopted as an institution and social and economic lives were built around
it. Many of the frontiersmen were descendants of indentured servitude had
little affection for slavery, others were dissenters from Europe fleeing
persecution who held strong ties to freedom, equality, and democratic institutions.
The highlanders resented their aristocratic brethren from the tidewater
areas and saw them as bent upon establishing a political system as oppressive
as the ones they had left in Europe. They saw slavery as the cause of their
trouble and in the early Southern frontier there was more prejudice against
the slaveholder than against the African American. [198]
The Cherokee missions of Western North Carolina found themselves bordered
on the West by abolitionist Benjamin Lundy founder of The Manumission Society
of Tennessee that purchased slaves and set them free. [199]
Lundy belonged to the American Convention of Abolition Society and his
abolitionist newspaper The Genius of Universal Emancipation had
once employed William Lloyd Garrison. It was the followers of Lundy and
other highlander abolitionists that established the "Underground Railroad"
running through the Appalachian highlands from Pennsylvania into the deep
South. [200] In an ironic note to history,
the "Underground Railroad" gets its name from the same limestone caves
from which the Cherokee, themselves, came to be known as the "cave dwellers."
[201]
On the other side of the Cherokee lay a large population of Quakers.
[202]
The Quakers helped found the North Carolina Manumission Society, which
had over forty branches extending into some of the most populous regions
in the state. The society denounced the slave trade, purchased slaves for
manumission, and enacted a law that at a certain age all persons should
be born free. Between 1824-1826, nearly two thousand slaves were freed
in North Carolina. [203] In 1830, the Society
published An Address to the People of North Carolina on the Evils of
Slavery that stated that slavery "is contrary to the plain and simple
maxims of the Christian Revelation, or religion of Christ."
[204]
Among the Baptists of the highlands, an "Emancipating Baptist" movement
began in Kentucky and spread throughout the mountains in the years between
1817-1830. The movement maintained that there was to be no fellowship with
slaveholders, but the movement was never to become an organization because
of the peculiar nature of Baptist polity. [205]
Among the more devout Calvinists of the Scotch-Irish stock, the anti-slavery
element tried to prohibit slavery from the State constitution of Kentucky.
Eventually, they were defeated in their efforts by the threat of the Alien
and Sedition Laws. [206]
In the late 1820's, the abolitionist movement spread within the Cherokee
Nation of North Carolina. The Cherokee American Colonization Society formed
in 1828 as an auxiliary of the African Colonization Society. [207]
Reverend David Brown, a mixed blood preacher, spoke for many Cherokee in
1825 when he said, "There are some Africans among us... they are generally
well treated and they much prefer living in the nation as a residence in
the United States...The presumption is that the Cherokees will, at no distant
date, cooperate with the humane efforts of those who are liberating and
sending this prescribed race to the land of their fathers." [208]
There is little doubt that the full-bloods among Evan Jones' missions,
who refused to lease mission lands to slaveholders, were exposed to the
abolitionist message subsequent to removal. For whatever reason, the number
of slaves among the Cherokee in North Carolina in 1835 was less than tenth
in number of any surrounding state. [209] Among
the fullbloods of the Cherokee Nation, a notion of what it meant to be
a member of the Cherokee Nation was developing and it was clearly one that
was not based upon the European concept of race.
A Land of Their Own
In 1827, the Cherokee people took what it considered its final steps
towards "civilization" by the establishment of a constitution, a bicameral
legislature, a judicial system, and an electoral process that elected John
Ross as principal chief. [210] This Constitution,
however, was shaped by the progressives and displayed their interests in
pursuing the course of civilization based upon the economic institution
of large scale agricultural plantations worked by African slaves. The Cherokee
Constitution, in deciding what it meant to be a Cherokee, expressed the
following position:
No person shall be eligible to a seat in the General Council
but a free Cherokee male citizen who shall have attained to the age of
twenty-five years; the descendants of Cherokee men by all free women except
[of] the African race, whose parents may be or have been living together
as man and wife according to the customs and laws of this nation, shall
be entitled to all the rights and privileges of this nation as well as
the posterity of Cherokee women by all free men. No person who is of negro
or mullatage parentage, either by the father or mother's side shall be
eligible to hold any office of profit, honor, or trust under this government.
[211]
In a powerful strike against Cherokee culture, a General Council dominated
by mixed bloods disenfranchised both women and blacks in the Cherokee Nation.
In so doing they set into motion powerful forces among the traditionalists
that was to affect Cherokee history for the next fifty years. In the words
of some, the Cherokee had finally gotten out from under a "government of
petticoats." [212]
The following year, the people of the United States elected Andrew Jackson,
noted Indian fighter and slave holder, to the presidency of the United
States. Less than a month after his inauguration and in his first message
to Congress, Freemason Andrew Jackson set forth his plan for the removal
of all of the Southeastern Indian nations to lands west of the Mississippi
River. Eleven days after Jackson's message to Congress, the state of Georgia
(bolstered by "their man in the White House") nullified all Cherokee laws,
prohibited the Cherokee government from meeting, and ordered the arrest
of anyone opposing emigration westward. [213]
When the Supreme Court of the United States under the leadership of Chief
Justice John Marshall (also a Freemason) recognized the sovereignty of
the Cherokee Nation, President Andrew Jackson replied, "John Marshall has
rendered his decision; now let him enforce it." [214]
In the minds of most of the people of the United States, and especially
among those inhabitants of the Southeast, the issues of slavery and removal
were indissoluably linked. [215] Among the
reasons for removal of the Muskogee, and especially the Seminoles, was
the presence of "another class" of citizens of the nation -- the African
Americans who posed significant threat to the whites and opportunity for
the blacks. [216] Moreover, the presence of
missionaries who seemed not only to be preaching a message of equality,
but manifesting one in their missions, was a tremendous threat to the institution
of chattel slavery. [217] Indicative of the
nature of the problem was the attitude of many of the missionaries was
that of Sophia Sawyer, when asked in 1832 by the Georgia Guard to remove
to African boys from her classroom, replied, "...until the Supreme Court
of the United States declares the Cherokee nation to be a part of the State
of Georgia I will obey Cherokee laws, which are just laws, not Georgia
laws." [218]
The relationship between slavery and removal was not lost upon the Cherokees,
though their understanding of the situation was propelled by a different
focus. Sawyer reported that following a sermon by Evan Jones on "If Providence
does not favor a nation, it cannot prosper," in one of the Valley Towns
of North Carolina, a discussion ensued regarding what sins could have turned
God's face away from the Cherokee Nation. "God cannot be pleased with slavery,"
said one of the Cherokees. There followed "some discussion respecting the
expediency of setting slaves at liberty." When one of those present noted
that freeing the slaves might cause more harm than good, a native Baptist
preacher replied, "I never heard tell of any hurt coming from doing right."
[219]
In 1835, the movement to free the African slaves that lived in the Cherokee
Nation was put into motion by several "influential men" of the nation.
They were making arrangements to emancipate the slaves and receive them
as Cherokee citizens. The following December, the "treaty party" of the
progressive slave-owning Cherokees, signed the Treaty of New Echota that
relinquished all lands east of the Mississippi and agreed to migrate to
the Cherokee lands beyond the Mississippi. According to Missionary Elizur
Butler, the Treaty of New Echota prevented the abolition of slavery within
the Cherokee Nation. Though the signers of this treaty were ultimately
punished for treason, the impact of this treaty would be disastrous upon
Cherokee and African alike for many years. [220]
On the eve of the forced displacement of the Five Civilized tribes,
the African-American presence among the Cherokees was estimated by an 1835
Census at approximately ten to fifteen percent of the Nation. [221]
Taking into account that free blacks and maroons of outlying communities
were seldom counted, we can assume the number to be much higher especially
among the Muskogee and Seminole. Tales were used to support the emigration
of the Five Nations, "they told em they was hogs runnin' around already
barbecued with a knife and fork in their back. Told em cotton growed so
tall you had to put little chaps up the stalk to get the top bolls." [222]
In spite of this enticement, the traditionalists were reluctant to leave
their ancestral homelands.
In the spring of 1838, the removal began for the Cherokee Nation. An
African American member of the community described the process:
The weeks that followed General Scott's order to remove the
Cherokees were filled with horror and suffering for the unfortunate Cherokees
and their slaves. The women and children were driven from their homes,
sometimes with blows and close on the heels of the retreating Indians came
greedy whites to pillage the Indian's homes, drive off their cattle, horses,
and pigs, and they even rifled the graves for any jewelry, or other ornaments
that might have been buried with the dead.
The Cherokees, after having been driven from their homes, were divided
into detachments of nearly equal size and late in October, 1838, the first
detachment started, the others following one by one. The aged, sick and
young children rode in the wagons, which carried provisions and bedding,
while others went on foot. The trip was made in the dead of winter and
many died from exposure from sleet and snow, and all who lived to make
this trip, or had parents who made it, will long remember it, as a bitter
memory. [223]
A Creek slave, the Patriarch Abraham, relates the story of Creek removal
tied to a prophecy,
Yes, sir, i seen the stars fall...so many people crowded into
de house till dere weight broke de sill. Dey was cryin and hollerin' but
the stars didnt hurt nobody...I reckon them stars kept fallin for bout
an hour. Folks thought that the end time was comin' and everybody got right
after dat.
Back at dat time de country was not settled much and dere was lots of
Indians. My grandpappy was a full blooded Indian but i don't know what
kind. De Indians was good people but if dey thought you had done `em wrong,
dey'd kill you right now. I saw some of dem when dey left dat country.
Dey women carried de babies in some sort of sacks, hung down in front of
`em, and de men carried some of de bigger chilluns on dey shoulders. dey
didnt have no property--jest lived wild in de woods. [224]
The more affluent progressives shipped their slaves ahead of themselves
to the western territory:
It was about 1838 that Louis Ross chartered a boat and shipped
five hundred slaves from Georgia to Fort Gibson, Indian territory. He said
the boat was in the charge of Dan Ross, and that Lewis Ross had come on
ahead and had settled on a plantation in saline District, Cherokee nation,
Indian Territory, where the present site of Salina is now located.
He said Lewis Ross met the boat with an armed guard of full-blood Indians
and ox wagons and took them to his plantation in Saline district. Here
a lot of the slaves were sold and a lot of them he kept to the farm and
run the salt works, which he later operated. [225]
Resistance among the Cherokees and the slaves was high, many were bound
before being brought out. [226] Others never
knew what hit them:
Families at dinner were startled by the sudden gleam of bayonets
in the doorway and rose up to be driven with blows or oaths along the weary
miles of trail that led to the stockade. Men were seized from their fields
or going along the road, women were taken from their wheels and children
from their play. In many cases, on turning for last look as they crossed
the ridge, they saw their home in flames fired by the lawless rabble that
followed on the heels of the soldiers. So keen were these outlaws on the
scent that in some instances they were driving off the cattle and other
stock almost before the soldiers had fairly started their owners in the
other direction. Systematic hunts were made by the same men for Indian
graves, to rob them of the silver pendants and other valuables deposited
with the dead. A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate
service said: "I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to
pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest
work I ever knew." [227]
The Indians, slaves, and white members of the slave nation were rounded
up into "concentration camps" [228] where they
were kept as "pigs in a sty." [229] Starvation
and disease was so rampant among those forcibly marched to the West that
missionary Daniel Buttrick said "we are almost becoming familiar with death."
[230]
A month later he was to say that the government might more mercifully have
put to death everyone under a year or over sixty; rather it had chosen
"a most expensive and painful way of exterminating these poor people."
[231]
Without a doubt, the Trail of Tears fell hardest upon those thousand
African Americans were forced to march, many without shoes, through the
dead of winter into Oklahoma. [232] The newspaper
reports of the time detailed a "peaceful and deathless trek of the Cherokees,"
[233]
but missionary Elizur Butler estimated conservatively that over 4600 Native
Americans and African Americans died on that nine-month march. More recent
estimates put the number of deaths at nearly 8,000 people who died as a
more or less direct result of the Cherokee Trail of Tears. [234]
An estimate of the number of African Americans who died on the Cherokee
Trail of Tears could be as much as one-fourth of those who made the trek
west.
Among the Muskogee and Seminoles where not only were relationships with
Africans quite deep but where Africans played prominent roles in their
society, the question of removal was very serious. The Africans among the
Southern Indians knew that they were the property of men from whom they,
or their ancestors, had fled, that the burden of proof lay upon them, and
that their losing to the United States government meant they would become
the property of whoever claimed them. [235]
In 1836, simultaneous wars were initiated by the United States government
to remove the Muskogee and their relative the Seminoles from their lands
in the deep South. The process was not completed until the commitment of
nearly forty thousand troops, ten years, forty million dollars, and fifteen
hundred soldiers lives later. [236] The removal
of the Muskogees, Seminoles, and their African counterparts was the costliest
war in American history until the Civil War.
Let us make no mistake about the nature of this endeavor. As General
Jessup, the leader of the campaign stated it in 1836, "This, you may be
assured, is a negro, not an Indian war: and if it be not speedily put down,
the South will feel the effects of it on their slave population before
the end of the next season." [237] Joshua Giddings
saw the war in a similar light; the Second Seminole War was "on our part
had not been commenced for the attainment of any high or noble purpose...Our
national influence and military power had been put forth to reenslave our
fellow men: to transform immortal beings into chattels; and to make them
to property of slave holders; to oppose the rights of human nature; and
the legitimate fruits of this policy were gathered in a plentiful harvest
of crime, bloodshed, and individual suffering." [238]
The Indians were led in their resistance by the same Afro-Indian leaders
who had fled deep into Florida to escape from slavery: Jim-Boy, Gopher
John, The Negro Abraham, Cudjo, Wild Cat, and many others led the Indians
in their struggle for resistance. Those leaders of the Muskogee and Seminole
such as Opothle Yahola, Micanopy, and Osceola (Asi Yahola) were religious
leaders who had deep ties to the African American communities in their
presence. [239] In the Spring of 1837, General
Jessup reasserted his position, "Throughout my operations I found the Negroes
the most active and determined warriors; and during the conference with
the Indian chiefs I ascertained that they exercised almost controlling
influence over them." [240]
To solve the problem, General Jessup set about to divide and conquer;
he offered to free the slaves who would separate from the Indians and allow
them to move to the west en masse. He wrote to John Horse, "to whom, and
to their people, I promised freedom and protection on their separating
from the Indians and surrendering." [241] Black
emancipation and removal had become the policy of the United States Army.
Jessup refused to return the African slaves to their owners in the South,
they would be sent to the West as part of the Seminole Nation. [242]
Though many Africans surrendered and the Seminoles followed suit, the struggle
to remove the last of the exiles from Florida went on for many years.
As they were proceeding west upon the trail watered by their own tears
and sanctified by the many gravestones of their children and elders, many
of the Muskogee Indians began to sing the spiritual "We are going home."
[243]
The words "We are going home to our homes and land; there is one who is
above and ever watches over us" rang true to those nurtured in a Christian
religion birthed in the cauldron of oppression. It also rang true to those
traditionalists among the Muskogee who believed that they emerged from
caves in the West and came east to settle in the Southeast. [244]
The Cherokee route to Oklahoma was blazed by African Americans, "my
grandparents were helped and protected by very faithful Negro slaves who...went
ahead of the wagons and killed any wild beast who came along." [245]
In spite of the fact that they were given the responsibility to guard with
"axes and guns" the caravans at night, few of the slaves made their escape.
The entire maroon community from among the Seminoles was granted freedom
by the United States government and relocated among the Creeks and the
Cherokee. [246] However, what for the Cherokee
became known as "the trail where we cried" [247]
was for the Africans amidst the Cherokee Nation an exodus. [248]
Large numbers of slaves and free Africans fled with the Cherokee and the
other southern nations to Indian Territory; they realized that as rough
as life on the trail could be, there could be no life for them in what
was their adopted homeland. By the outbreak of the Civil War, the African
American population within the Cherokee Nation would amount to about twenty
percent of the nation. [249]
The missionaries would be with the Cherokee through the struggle in
the homelands, the concentration camps, and the agony of the journey; they
would also be with many of the Cherokee at their deaths. A revival swept
through the camps [250] as they were gathering
to face this awful journey:
Brethren Wickliffe and Oganaya, and a great number of the members
of the church in the valley Towns, fell upon Fort Butler, seven miles from
the mission. They never relaxed from their evangelical labors, but preached
constantly in the fort. They had church meetings, received ten members,
and one Sabbath, June 17, by permission of the officer in command, went
down to the river and baptized them (five males and females). They were
guarded to the river and back. Some whites present affirm it to have been
the most solemn and impressive religious service they ever witnessed. [251]
Contingencies heading west were led by the ministers Evan Jones, Jesse
Bushyhead, and Stephen Foreman of the American Board; the records of the
Trail of Tears show that along the way the churches themselves were allowed
to congregate and express their faith. Reverend Jesse Bushyhead expressed
his thanks that were able "to continue, amidst the toil and sufferings
of the journey, their accustomed religious services;" [252]
he described worship amidst the travail:
There were 66 members of the church in the Baptist connection
in the detachment. Out of this number, we selected two brethren to keep
up regular worship during our travel; to wit Tsusuwala, and Foster, who
has lately joined the Baptist Church, quite an active and useful man. These
two brethren performed the duty enjoined on them by the brethren, faithfully.
They frequently held prayer meetings, and exhorted the brethren on evenings
during the week, and on every Lord's day, except that one time we traveled
five miles, to get forage for our teams...
On the 3rd of February, three members were received by the
church, and were baptized, and on the 10th, we collected together, in the
midst of our camps, and surrounded the Lord's table. The brethren and sisters
apparently enjoyed the presence of God. Several came forward for prayer.
In the many deaths which have taken place on the road, several of the members
of the church were called from time to eternity, and some evidently died
in the full triumph of faith. [253]
We can rest assured that whenever faces gathered around the campfire, there
were Africans there to serve as spiritual guides into the wilderness. When
there were dances to celebrate, lost children to mourn, or seasons passing
to be marked, there were Africans present. In addition, we must never forget
that on the "trail where we cried," there were also African tears.
Footnotes
[1] Carter G. Woodson, "The Beginnings of Miscegenation
of the Whites and Blacks" Journal of Negro History 3 (1918): 342.
[2] Woodson, 343.
[3] Carter G. Woodson, "The Relations of Negroes
and Indians in Massachusetts" Journal of Negro History 5 (1920):
45.
[4] Booker T. Washington, The Story of the
Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery Vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday
and Company, 1909), 126.
[5] William G. McLoughlin, "Red, White, and
Black in the Ante-bellum South," in The Cherokee Ghost Dance: Essays
on the Southeastern Indians (Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1984),
147.
[6] James B. Thacher, Christopher Columbus,
Volume III (New York, 1903), 379.
[7] Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus
(New
York: Random House, 1976), 57-67.
[8] Carl Waldman, Atlas of the North American
Indian (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1985), 72. See also
Leo Wiener, Africa and the Discovery of America (Philadelphia, 1920);
Jack Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and
the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1993); Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus (New York:
Random House, 1976); Michael Bradley, Dawn Voyage (Toronto: Summerhill
Press, 1987).
[9] Reader's Digest, Mysteries of the Ancient
Americas: The New World Before Columbus (Pleasantville, N.Y.: Reader's
Digest Association, 1986), 132.
[10] Leo Wiener, Africa and the Discovery
of America (Philadelphia, 1920), 263-270.
[11] Reader's Digest, 10-17.
[12] J. Leitch Wright, Creeks and Seminoles
(Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 77.
[13] The Kituwhan linguistic group of the
Cherokee grew up in and around the temple mound cultures of Nikwasi and
Kituwah near Franklin and Bryson City, N.C. Cherokee legend has it that
these mounds were built by the ancestors of the ancient Ani-kituwhagi,
the
original nucleus of the Cherokee Nation. (James Mooney, "Myths of the Cherokees"
(Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1900), 395-396). Janey Hendrix, in her work
"Redbird Smith and the Nighthawk Keetoowahs," stresses the influence of
the Natchez culture on the Keetoowah Society. (Janey Hendrix "Redbird Smith
and The Nighthawk Keetoowahs." Journal of Cherokee Studies 8 (Fall,
1983): 24). According to Keetoowah legend, the Cherokees lived somewhere
east of South America on islands in the Atlantic Ocean before they migrated
to the Southeastern United States. (Howard Tyner, "The Keetoowah Society
in Cherokee History" (Masters Thesis, University of Tulsa, 1949, 27). These
citations are listed not as historical imperatives, but to suggest possibilities.
[14] "Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca," Spanish
Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-1543 (New York, 1907),
55 -126. See also Kenneth Wiggins Porter, "Relations Between Negroes
and Indians Within the Present United States," Journal of Negro History
17 ( Number 3, 1932): 289.
[15] Edward Gaylord Bourne, Narratives
of the Career of Hernando de Soto, 2 Vols. (New York, 1922), 1:72.
[16] R.R. Wright, "Negro Companions of the
Spanish Explorers," American Anthropologist 4 (1902): 217-28.
[17] Woodbury Lowery, The Spanish Settlements
within the Present Limits of the United States: 1513-1561, (New York:
Bolton and Ross, 1905), 162.
[18] Lowery, 169.
[19] Bourne, 60, 94-9, 103-105.
[20] J.B. Davis, "Indian Territory in 1878,"
Chronicles
of Oklahoma IV (1926): 264.
[21] Rudi Halliburton, Red Over Black:
Black Slavery Among the Cherokee Indians (Westport: Greenwood Press,
1977), 6.
[22] Booker T. Washington, The Story of
the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery Vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday
and Co., 1909), 141
[23] Almon Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial
Times within the Present Limits of the United States (New York: Ph.D.
diss., Columbia University, 1933), 27.
[24] John Reed, A Law of Blood: The Primitive
Law of the Cherokee Nation, (New York: New York University Press, 1970),
187-188; Fred Gearing, "Priests and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee
Politics in the Eighteenth Century," American Anthropologist 64:
No. 5, Part 2, October 1965, 26; Almon Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial
Times within the Present Limits of the United States (Ph.D. diss.,
Columbia University, 1933), 40; Richard Satler, "Muskogee and Cherokee
Women's Status" in Laura Klein and Lillian Ackerman, Women and Power
in Native America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 222;
Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American
Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 36; Wilma Mankiller
and Michael Wallis, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1993), 207.
[25] It is interesting at this point to note
that the first Cherokee woman to own an African slave was Nancy Ward, an
historic Ghigau or Beloved Woman of the Cherokee of member of the
Council. In the battle of Taliwa against the Muskogee in 1755, her husband
Kingfisher was killed in battle. Ghigau picked up her husband's rifle and
fought the opponents so fiercely that she was appointed to the war council.
As a reward for her valor, she was awarded an African captured in battle
from among the Creeks. She became "the first slaveholder among the Cherokee,"
and is also credited with becoming the first to own cattle and make butter
after being taught how to do so by Mrs. Bean, a white atsi nahtsa'i.
( J.B. Davis, "Slavery in the Cherokee Nation" Chronicles of Oklahoma
11, no. 4 (December 1933), 1057)
[26] Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution
of Cherokee Society 1540-1866 (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press,
1979), 12-18.
[27] Tom Hatley, The Dividing Path: Cherokees
and South Carolinians through the Revolutionary Era ( New York; Oxford
University Press, 1995), 233.
[28] William McLoughlin, The Cherokee Ghost
Dance, 260-265.
[29]Perdue, 36.
[30] Kenneth W. Porter, Relations Between
Negroes and Indians Within the Present United States (Washington, D.C.:
The Association for Negro Life and History, 1931), 16.
[31] Aristotle quoted in Tzvetan Todorov,
The
Conquest of America (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 152. See also
James Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indian (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1970).
[32] Juan Gines de Sepulveda, Democritus
Alter (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Instituto
Francisco de Vitoria, 1984), 33.
[33] Bartholomeo de Las Casas, In Defense
of the Indians (Dekalb: Northern University Press, 1974), 5.
[34] Las Casas, 6.
[35] For an excellent discussion of this issue,
see Louis Ruchamps, "The Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial America"
in The Journal of Negro History 52 (1967): 251-273.
[36] Martin Luther used the Bible to justify
slavery; Sir Thomas More included slavery in his Utopia (John Howard Lawson,
The
Hidden Heritage (New York, 1950) 102, 116-117, 172). See also
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Society, (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1966); Louis B. Wright, Religion and Empire:
The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in English Expansionism, 1558-1625
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943).
[37] Daniel P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley,
Black
Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1523-1865 (New York:
1962), 22.
[38] Francis Jennings, The Invasion of
America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press,1975), 6.
[39] See Almon Lauber, Indian Slavery in
Colonial Times within the Present Limits of the United States (Ph.D.
diss., Columbia University, 1933); Barbara Olexer, The Enslavement of
the American Indian (Monroe, N.Y.: Library Research Associates, 1982);
J. Leitch Wright, The Only Land They Knew:The Tragic Story of the American
Indian in the Old South (New York: Free Press, 1981); Jack Weatherford,
Native
Roots: How the Indians Enriched America (New York: Crown Publishers,
1991); Patrick Minges, Evangelism and Enslavement: Catholic and Protestant
Missions to the Native Americans (Unpublished Manuscript, 1992).
[40] Booker T. Washington, The Story of
the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery Vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday
and Co., 1909), 128-130.
[41] Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes
in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New
York: W. W. Norton Company, 1974), 39.
[42] Lauber, 39.
[43] Washington, 129.
[44] Gary Nash, Red,White and Black: The
Peoples of Early America (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1974),
130.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Nash, 132.
[47] Carl Waldman and Molly Braun, Atlas
of the American Indian (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1985),
104.
[48]William Anews quoted in Olexer, 172.
[49]Waldman, 105.
[50] H.T. Malone, Cherokees of the Old
South:A People in Transition (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1956), 20.
[51] Mooney, 32.
[52] Ibid.
[53] Lauber, 136.
[54] Waldman, 105.
[55] Interestingly enough, these twenty Africans
brought into the United States were part of a plan by Virginian, Sir Edwin
Sandys to finance a fledgling school for Indians named William and Mary.
Whenever Native American children in the Carolinas and Virginia were seized
as captives of war, they were sent to William and Mary. The irony that
African slaves were first brought to the United States by the English to
finance a school for Indian slaves is quite striking indeed.
[56] Indian slaves were considered to be "sullen,
insubordinate, and short lived," A.B. Hart quoted in Sanford Wilson, "Indian
Slavery in the South Carolina Region," Journal of Negro History
22 (1935), 440. The article further describes Native American slaves as
"not of such robust and strong bodies, as to lift great burdens, and endure
labor and slavish work." Native Americans were not without some commercial
value. They were often seized throughout the South and taken to the slave
markets and traded at an exchange rate of two for one for African Americans.
An interesting spin on the story comes from Booker T. Washington and W.E.B.
Dubois who, even in agreement with the positions stated above, stated that
"The Indian refused to submit to bondage and to learn the white man's ways.
The result is that the greater portion of the American Indians have disappeared,
the greater portion of those who remain are not civilized. The Negro, wiser
and more enduring than the Indian, patiently endured slavery; and contact
with the white man has given him a civilization vastly superior to that
of the Indian." (Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois, The Negro in
the South: His Economic Progress in Relation to His Moral and Religious
Development (Philadelphia, George W. Jacobs and Company, 1907) 14.)
Professor Washington reiterates this point by quoting Dr. John Spencer,
who in discussing the collapse of indentured servitude and Indian slavery,
stated "In each case it was survival of the fittest. Both Indian slavery
and white servitude were to go down before the black man's superior endurance,
docility, and labour capacity." (Dr. John Spencer quoted in Booker T. Washington,
The
Story of the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery Vol. 1 (New York:
Doubleday and Co., 1909) 113).
[57] George Washington Williams, History
of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880: Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers,
and as Citizens (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1882), 123-180.
[58] David Brion Davis, 176.
[59] Booker T. Washington in The Story
of the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery describes it thus:
"During all this time, for a hundred years or maybe more, the Indian and
the Negro worked side by side as slaves. In all the laws and regulations
of the Colonial days, the same rule which applied to the Indian was also
applied to the Negro slaves...In all other regulations that were made in
the earlier days for the control of the slaves, mention is invariably made
of the Indian as well as the Negro." (130).
[60]J. Leitch Wright. The Only Land They
Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indian in the Old South (New
York: Free Press, 1981), 258.
[61] Wood, 39.
[62] John Norris, quoted in Verner Crane,
The
Southern Frontier, 1670-1732 (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1928),
113.
[63] Melville Herskovits, The American
Negro: A Study in Crossing (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), 3-15;
For excellent surveys and discussions of this phenomenon, see: Kenneth
W. Porter, Relations Between Negroes and Indians Within the Present
United State (Washington, D.C.: The Association for Negro Life and
History, 1931); J.Leitch Wright, The Only Land They Knew:The Tragic
Story of the American Indian in the Old South (New York: Free Press,
1981); Jack Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race
and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Urbana:University of Illinois
Press,1993); Laurence Foster, Negro-Indian Relations in the Southeast
(Philadelphia,
n.p. 1935); Booker T. Washington, The Story of the Negro: The Rise of
the Race from Slavery Vol 1. (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1909),
125-143. Professor Washington notes as prominent African American/ native
American mixed-blood Frederick Douglas, Paul Cuffee, and Crispus Attucks
(132).
[64] The Chickamagua towns, who spoke the
Kituwhan dialect, were composed of those Cherokees who had fled west from
the encroaching Virginians and established five new towns on the western
border with the Creek Nation. These towns were noted for their racial diversity
and openness to people of all nationality. They were seen as being "ethnically
open in a way that the older [Cherokee] towns were not." (Tom Hatley, The
Dividing Path: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Revolutionary
Era ( New York; Oxford University Press, 1995) 225).
[65] Galphintown was named for George Galphin,
a mixed blood who was a prominent Indian trader in the Creek Nation and
Indian Agent for the First Continental Congress. Galphin extensively utilized
African Americans as scouts, translators and laborers in his trade with
the Nations of the Southeastern United States. Galphin at one point or
another in his life had a number of African American and Native American
wives and a number of his children were of mixed blood. One of George Galphin's
sons, Jesse Galphin, was a member of the "Negro Baptist Church at Silver
Bluff" (Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 81) and went on to form an independent
African Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia. Another Native American member
of the Silver Bluff Baptist Church, Henry Francis, founded an independent
African Baptist Church in Savannah. George Galphin was an associate of
Alexander McGillivray and William Augustus Bowles, mixed blood leaders
of the Creek Nation and prominent Native American Freemasons. Both McGillivray
and Bowles had extensive dealings and even family relations with African
Americans and maroons of the Creek and Seminole Nation. For further information,
see J. Leitch Wright, Creeks and Seminoles (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1986); James Melvin Washington, Frustrated Fellowship,
the Black Baptist Quest for Social Power (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University
Press, 1986); Joel W. Martin, Sacred Revolt : the Muskogees' Struggle
for a New World (Boston : Beacon Press, 1991); Angie Debo, The Road
to Disapearance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1941);William
R. Denslow, Freemasonry and the American Indian (St Louis: Missouri
Lodge of Research, 1956).
[66] Wood, 99.
[67] John Curdman Hurd, The Law of Freedom
and Bondage in the United States (Boston, 1858-1862, Vol. 1), 303.
[68] William Willis, "Anthropology and Negroes
on the Southern Colonial Frontier," in James Curtis and Lewis Gould, eds.,
The
Black Experience in America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970),
47-48.
[69] Quoted in William S. Willis, Jr., "Divide
and Rule: Red, White, and Black in the Southeast," Journal of Negro
History 48 (1963): 165; Robert Meriwether, The Expansion of South
Carolina (Kingsport Tennessee: Southern Publishers, 1940), 6.
[70] John Stuart quoted in William S. Willis,
Jr., "Divide and Rule: Red, White, and Black in the Southeast," Journal
of Negro History 48 (1963): 161.
[71] Ibid., 162.
[72] John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to
Freedom: A History of American Negroes (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1947),
86; Carter G. Woodson, The Negro in Our History (Washington, D.C.:
Associated Publishers, 1922), 187-193.
[73] Herbert Aptheker, "Maroons within the
Present Limits of the United States" Journal of Negro History 24
(1939): 167-184.
[74] J. Leitch Wright, The Only Land They
Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indian in the Old South (New
York: Free Press, 1981), 278; Lauber, 119.
[75] S.C. Journal of Council, July
9, 1759, C.O., 5/474/536.
[76] Aptheker, 169.
[77] Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Theda Perdue,
"Indians in Southern History" in Frederick E. Hoxie, ed., Indians in
American History (Arlington Heights, IL: Newberry Library, 1988), 140.
[78] James Glen, quoted in Willis, "Divide
and Rule: Red, White, and Black in the Southeast," 165.
[79] Wood, 116.
[80] Woodson, 344.
[81] Laurence Hauptman, Between Two Fires:
American Indians and the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1995), 3.
See also Gerald Sider, Lumbee Indian Histories: Race, Ethnicity,
and Indian Identity in the Southern United States (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1993); John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North
Carolina, 1790-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1943).
[82] Kenneth Wiggins Porter, "Negroes on the
Southern Frontier, 1670-1763, " Journal of Negro History 27 (1942):
57-58.
[83] The Catawba were particularly noted for
their capabilities as slave catchers. In 1765, the Governor of South Carolina
sent the Catawba after a group of fugitive slaves in the mountains. This
vigorous maroon colony in the Blue Ridge Mountains was harassed by the
Catawba "partly by the Terror of their name, their diligence, and their
singular sagacity in pursuing Enemies through such Thickets" (Laurence
Hauptman, Between Two Fires: American Indians and the Civil War (New
York: Free Press, 1995), 89). The Cherokee consistently refused to negotiate
contracts and treaties with whites which required them to return runaway
slaves, and even when they did sign them, they refused to live up to the
agreement. The headman at Nuquasee in negotiating with the English, stated:
"This small rope we show you is all we have to bind our slaves with, and
may be broken, but you have iron chains for yours; however if we catch
your slaves, we shall bind them as we can, and deliver them to our friends
again, and have no pay for it." (Quoted in Crane, Southern Frontier,
300)
[84] Quoted in David Brion Davis, The Problem
of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966),
181.
[85] Onitositah (Corn Tassel) quoted in Lee
Miller, ed. From the Heart: Voices of the American Indian (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 131.
[86] John Marrant, A Narrative of the Life
of John Marrant, of New York, in North America With [an] account of the
conversion of the king of the Cherokees and his daughter (London: C.J.
Farncombe, n.d), 8.
[87] Marrant, 18.
[88] During the time that Marrant lived among
the Southern nations, these same nations were often in intense conflicts
with the English colonists of the Carolinas. These nations sided with the
British in the Revolutionary and were very much involved with Tory intrigue
in the Carolinas. It is interesting that Marrant, a colonist, was allowed
to move so freely among these people who were at war with the colonials.
[89] Marrant, 20-23.
[90] See John Marrant, A Narrative of the
Life of John Marrant, of New York, in North America With [an] account of
the conversion of the king of the Cherokees and his daughter (London:
C.J. Farncombe, n.d.); Arthur Schomburg, "Two Negro Missionaries to the
American Indians, John Marrant and John Stewart" The Journal of Negro
History, v. xxi, n.1, January, 1936; Henry Louis Gates, "Writing Race
and the Difference it Makes" Critical Inquiry, V 12, n1, 1985; Henry
Louis Gates, "The Blackness of Blackness - A Critique of the Sign and the
Signifying Monkey," Critical Inquiry, v. 9, n4, 1983; Rafia Zafar,
"Capturing the Captivity: African Americans among the Puritans" The
Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of
the United States (Vol. 17 no. 2, 1991-1992 Summer): 19-35; Benilde
Montgomery, "Recapturing John Marrant" in Frank Shuffleton, ed., A Mixed
Race: Ethnicity in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993), 105-15.
[91] Interestingly enough, Marrant did not
fight with the colonials in the Revolutionary War. He joined with the British,
as did the Cherokee, and fought with the Royal Navy in the siege of Charleston.
(Schomburg, 397)
[92] Prince Hall, Peter Bess, and others.
"To the Honorable Council and House of representatives for the State of
Massachusetts Bay, in General Court assembled, January 13, 1777." in A.G.
Clark, Jr., Clark's History of Prince Hall Freemasonry 1775-1945 (Des
Moines: United Grand Lodge of Iowa, F. & A.M,1947), 22.
[93] William Muraskin, Middle Class Blacks
in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1975), 32-35.
[94] The struggle for the recognition of African
American Freemasons as legitimate Freemasons is an ongoing struggle. An
example is this quote from a North Carolina Freemasonic periodical from
1994."Our basic Masonic beliefs and practices of tolerance and the Brotherhood
of man under the Fatherhood of God are not always practiced. Excluding
people solely because of race is morally indefensible...If good men ask,
then we should help them regardless of race. Our code has no racial barriers...The
Brotherhood of man under the Fatherhood of God is our reason for existence."
North Carolina Grand Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons, "As We
Enter the 21st Century: Race and Freemasonry, " in The North Carolina
Mason, (Raleigh, N.C.: North Carolina Grand Lodge,1994).
[95] Washington, The Story of the Negro,
151.
[96] See Harry E. Davis, A History of Freemasonry
Among Negroes in America (N.Y.: United Supreme Council, Ancient and
Accepted Scottish Rite Freemasonry, Northern Jurisdiction, U.S.A., 1946);
Harry Williamson, Prince Hall Primer (N.Y.: n.p. , 1946); Martin
Delaney, The Origins and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry, Its Introduction
into the United States and Legitimacy among Colored Men (Pittsburgh,
n.p., 1853); William Muraskin, Middle Class Blacks in a White Society:
Prince Hall Freemasonry in America (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1975); Loretta J. Williams, Black Freemasonry and Middle-class
Realities (Columbia : University of Missouri Press, 1980).
[97] Patrick Minges, Freemasons in the
Civil Rights Movement (unpublished manuscript, 1986); North Carolina
Grand Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons, "As We Enter the 21st
Century: Race and Freemasonry, " in The North Carolina Mason, (Raleigh,
N.C.: North Carolina Grand Lodge,1994).
[98] Washington, The Story of the Negro,
129;
Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880: Negroes
as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens, 173-174.
[99] Carter G. Woodson, "The Relations of
Negroes and Indians in Massachusetts," Journal of Negro History
5 (1920): 45-57.
[100] Franklin, 108.
[101] Franklin, 106.
[102] Phyllis Wheatley in Edwin Gaustad,
A
Documentary History of Religion in America to the Civil War (Grand
Rapids: William B. Eerdman's Company, 1993), 253
[103] "Trade and Intercourse Act, March 30,
1802" in Francis Paul Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy
Second
Edition (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990), 19.
[104] Joy Bilharz, "The Changing Status of
Seneca Women" in Laura Klein and Lillian Ackerman, Women and Power in
Native America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 103; Richard
Satler, "Muskogee and Cherokee Women's Status" in Laura Klein and Lillian
Ackerman, Women and Power in Native America (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 223. It is important to note that this distinction
is much less evident among the Native American Nations of the Southeast
than it is for their Northern counterparts. Southern men did play a greater
role in agriculture than did the men of other nations.
[105] Mankiller, 19.
[106] R. Pierce Beaver,Church, State,
and the American Indians (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1966),
53-83; R. Douglas Hunt, Indian Agriculture in America (Lawrence:
University of Kansas Press, 1987), 33.
[107] Hunt, 96.
[108] American State Papers: Indian Affairs,
Vols. I and II, Documents, Legislative and Executive of the Congress of
the United States, Walter Lowrie, Walter S. Franklin, and Matthew St.
Clair Clarke, eds., (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1832,1834), Vol.
I, 123-125.
[109] Bilharz, 108; Allen, 32; Mankiller,
19; Perdue, 50.
[110]American State Papers: Indian Affairs,
Vols. I and II, Documents, Legislative and Executive of the Congress of
the United States, Walter Lowrie, Walter S. Franklin, and Matthew St.
Clair Clarke, eds., (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1832,1834), Vol.
I, 53.
[111] Ibid.
[112] Thomas Jefferson quoted in Joseph Parsons,
"Civilizing the Indians of the Old Northwest, 1800-1810," Indiana Magazine
of History 56 (Sept. 1960): 202.
[113] Michael Roethler, "Negro Slavery among
the Cherokee Indians, 1540-1866" (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1964),
32.
[114] Robert Berkhofer, Salvation and
the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response
1787-1862 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), 73-74; Henry
Warner Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981) 174-176; Hunt, 101.
[115] William G. McLoughlin, "Indian Slaveholders
and Presbyterian Missionaries 1837-1861," Church History 42 (December
1973): 535-551; Perdue, 98, 120; William G. McLoughlin, Cherokees and
Missionaries, 1789-1839 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 48;
Halliburton, 25. This is not to say that the practice of African slavery
did not exist prior to this time for records presented by Halliburton and
Perdue give evidence that it surely did. The presence of the practice of
slave-catching and slave possession is quite different from the institution
of African slavery and the use of chattel slavery as a primary tool of
agricultural practice. It was only the "civilization" programs of Washington
and Jefferson that led to the growth of plantation economies based on the
institution of African slavery.
[116] Charles Whipple, Relation of the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to Slavery (Boston:
R.F. Wallcut, 1861), 88.
[117] "Report of the Journey of the Brethren
Abraham Steiner and Frederick C. De Schweinitz to the Cherokees and the
Cumberland Settlements" in Samuel Cole Williams, Early Travels in the
Tennessee Country, 1540-1800 (Johnson City, n.p., 1928), 490.
[118] In fact the first recorded worship
service to be held by missionaries was held for the slaves of James Vann
in his home by the Moravian missionary Abraham Steiner. (Edmund Schwarze,
History of the Moravian Indian Missions among the Southern Indian Tribes
of the United States (Bethlehem, PA.: Times Publishing Co., 1923),
63 ff.).
[119] William G. McLoughlin, Cherokees
and Missionaries, 49.
[120] There is some debate whether James
Madison is a Freemason or not. He is credited with being so and Allen Roberts
in his Freemasonry in American History (Richmond: Macoy Publishing
and Masonic Supply Company, 1985) states that he was a Freemason. However,
there is little evidence to prove so.
[121] Ross and Jackson were both Freemasons
from the State of Tennessee.
[122] R. Pierce Beaver, Church, State,
and the American Indians (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1966),
68.
[123] Beaver, 76.
[124] Halliburton, 22-24.
[125] William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee
Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986), 71.
[126] Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis,
Mankiller: A Chief and Her People (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993),
78. See also Theda Perdue, "Indians in Southern History" in Frederick
E. Hoxie, ed. Indians in American History (Arlington Heights, IL:
Newberry Library, 1988); H. T. Malone, Cherokees of the Old South:A
People in Transition (Athens: Univ. Of GA. Press, 1956); William Gerald
McLoughlin, Champions of the Cherokees: Evan and John B. Jones (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); William Gerald McLoughlin,
After the Trail of Tears: the Cherokees' Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839-1880
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); William Gerald
McLoughlin and Walter H. Conser, The Cherokees and Christianity, 1794-1870:
Essays on Acculturation and Cultural Persistence (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1994); Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the
Southeastern United States (New York, 1933).
[127] William Bartram, Travels through
North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee
country, the extensive territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek confederacy,
and the country of the Chactaws; containing an account of the soil and
natural productions of those regions, together with observations on the
manners of the Indians (Philadelphia: James & Johnson,1791),
20.
[128] Charles Whipple, Relation of the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to Slavery (Boston:
R.F. Wallcut, 1861), 98; see also Robert T. Lewit, The Conflict
of Evangelical and Humanitarian Ideals: A Case Study (Masters thesis,
Harvard University, 1959), 35-53.
[129] Robert Walker, Torchlight to the
Cherokees (New York: The MacMillan Co, 1931), 86-87.
[130] Lewit, 102; see also Halliburton,
28.
[131] McLoughlin, The Cherokee Ghost Dance:
Essays on the Southeastern Indians, 257.
[132] Lewit, 97.
[133]William McLoughlin, "Red, White, and
Black in the Antebellum South" in American Quarterly 26 (1974):
367- 385.
[134] McLoughlin, American Quarterly,
372
[135] Selah B. Treat, "Report to the Commissioners
of the American Board for Foreign and Christian Missions, 1848" in Charles
Whipple, Relation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions to Slavery (Boston: R.F. Wallcut, 1861), 97.
[136] Perdue, 121.
[137] Mankiller and Wallis, 123. See also
William Gerald McLoughlin, Champions of the Cherokees: Evan and John
B. Jones (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); William
Gerald McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears: the Cherokees' Struggle
for Sovereignty, 1839-1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1993); William G. McLoughlin and Walter H. Conser, The Cherokees
and Christianity, 1794-1870: Essays on Acculturation and Cultural Persistence
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee
Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986).
[138] Many of the traditional leaders of
the Native Americans were Freemasons. Tecumseh, a Shawnee prophet who reportedly
"was made a Mason while on a visit to Philadelphia," was the leader of
a Pan-Indian movement to resist white encroachment in the late eighteenth
century. Alexander McGillivray, a mixed blood leader of the Muskogee, and
Joseph Brant, a mixed blood leader of the Mohawk, were skilled political
leaders who set European colonists against one another in order to protect
and preserve traditional interests in early America. Brant was reportedly
America's first Native American Freemason when he was raised by an English
Grand Lodge (much the same as Prince Hall); McGillivray's lodge membership
was not know but he was buried with a Masonic funeral. Red Jacket, famous
orator of the Seneca and leader of the traditionalist resistance among
the Iroquois, was a Freemason who reportedly encouraged the Seneca to reject
William Morgan when he sought refuge among them. Red Jacket's grandnephew,
General Ely S. Parker, was General U.S. Grant's Adjutant and drew up the
conditions of surrender at Appomatox. Robert E. Lee, thinking Parker was
an African-American , refused to meet with Grant until the matter was cleared
up. William Augustus Bowles, leader of a Creek/Seminole/African-American
resistance movement in Florida, was also a Freemason having been raised
in the Bahamas. Pushmataha, a Choctaw leader who encouraged friendship
with the whites and resisted Tecumseh, was also a Freemason. (William R
Denslow, Freemasonry and the American Indian (St Louis: Missouri
Lodge of Research, 1956) ).
[139] Bill Gilbert, God Gave Us this Country:
Tekamthi and the First American Civil War (New York , Anchor Books,
1989), 218-221; Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North
American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1992), 148-190. See also Joel W. Martin, Sacred
Revolt : the Muskogees' Struggle for a New World (Boston : Beacon Press,
1991); Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, Mankiller: A Chief and Her
People (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993; Joshua Giddings, The
exiles of Florida: or, The crimes committed by our government against the
Maroons, who fled from South Carolina and other slave states, seeking protection
under Spanish laws (Columbus, Ohio: Follett, Foster and Company, 1858);
Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border (Lubbock: Texas Tech University
Press, 1993); J. Leitch Wright, Creeks and Seminoles (Lincoln: University.
of Nebraska Press, 1986); Daniel Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977); Daniel Littlefield, The Cherokee
freedmen: from Emancipation to American Citizenship (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1978); Daniel Littlefield, Africans and Creeks: from
the Colonial Period to the Civil War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1979); Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society 1540-1866
(Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1979).
[140] Joel Martin, Sacred Revolt: The
Muskogees Struggle for a New World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 73.
[141] Wood, 260. Christian Pryber, Jesuit
sojourner among the Cherokee from 1736-1743 described a "kingdom of paradise"
among the Cherokee people, especially located in the Cherokee capital of
Tellico and among the Chickamagua Cherokees. Welcome in this paradise were
all runaway slaves, African as well as Native American and "all others
who would fly thither Justice or their Masters." Though modern historians
give credit to Pryber for initiating a vision of a modern "utopia," it
is more likely that he was simply describing Cherokee society as it existed
during this period. See also Verner F. Crane "The Lost Utopia on
the American Frontier." Sewanee Review, XXVII (1919): 48; Carter
G. Woodson, The Negro in Our History, 187-189; Hatley, 55.
[142] Giddings, 4.
[143] Roethler, 36-40.
[144] Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border
(Lubbock:
Texas Tech University Press, 1993), 7; See also Angie Debo, The
Road to Disappearance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1941).
[145] Kenneth W. Porter, Relations Between
Negroes and Indians Within the Present United States (Washington, D.C.:
The Association for Negro Life and History, 1931, 40. See also Woodson,
The
Negro in Our History, 189-198; Imari Obadele, New African state-building
in North America: a Study of Reaction under the Stress of Conquest
(Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1985).
[146] Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border
(Lubbock:
Texas Tech University Press), 1993.
[147] It is important to note that many Muskogees
and Seminoles referred to their African brethren as their "slaves" to protect
them from white slaveholders who sought their return. In addition, there
was some social status acquired by owning slaves, even though the Muskogees
and Seminoles had little need for slave labor because they did not adopt
plantation style agriculture as did the northern nations of the Five Civilized
Tribes.
[148] Martin, 73; J. Leitch Wright, 73-99;
Debo, The Road to Disappearance, 115. See also Daniel Littlefield,
Africans
and Seminoles (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977); Daniel Littlefield,
Africans
and Creeks: from the colonial period to the Civil War (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1979).
[149] Mulroy, 19.
[150] Wiley Thompson to Lewis Cass, April
27,1835 in National Archives Microfilm Publications, Microcopy M234, Record
Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Letters Received by
the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824-1881.
[151] John L. Williams, The Territory
of Florida, rpt. ed. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1962
[1837]), 239.
[152] Francis Le Jau quoted in Mulroy, 74.
[153] Martin,75; Wright, The Only Land
They Knew, 265.
[154] Wood, Black Majority, 298-301.
[155] Martin, 73.
[156] J. Leitch Wright, Creeks and Seminoles,
190.
[157] Kenneth Wiggins Porter, The Negro
on the American Frontier (New York: N.Y. Times with Grove Press, 1971),
241.
[158] Vincent Harding, There is a River:
The Black Struggle for freedom in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich Publishers, 1981), 100-111.
[159] Giddings, 44-45.
[160] Foster, 24.
[161] McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries,
48; Perdue, 89; McLoughlin, Champions of the Cherokees, 21; Wright,
Creeks
and Seminoles, 223; Eighth Annual Report of the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Boston: Crocker and Brewster,1818),
16; Ninth Annual Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions (Boston, Crocker and Brewster, 1819), 19.
[162] Edward Freeman, The Epoch of Negro
Baptists and The Foreign Missions Boards [ National Baptist Convention,
U.S.A., Inc] (Kansas City: The National Seminary Press, 1953), 10.
[163] Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel, Classified Digest of the Records of the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts 1701-1892 (London: Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1893), 12.
[164] Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel, 16-17.
[165] "Brainerd Journal" April 20,
1817, February 12, 1818, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,
Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions [microform].
(Woodbridge, Conn. : Research Publications, 1982).
[166] The positive attitude of the Cherokees
toward African-American missionaries could be related to the fact that
the first missionary among the Cherokee was a black Methodist, John Marrant.
Marrant's mission in 1740, in which he converted the "king" of the Cherokees,
is considered among he most successful missionary enterprise among the
Cherokee. According to Michael Roethler, "It is only natural that the Cherokees
should judge the value of Christianity by the Character of the people who
professed it...The Cherokees had no reason to suspect the religion of this
Negro preacher." (Roethler,126)
[167] Melville Herskovitz, "Social History
of the Negro," A Handbook of Social Psychology (Worcester, J. Clark
Press, 1935), 256.
[168] James Mooney, "The Cherokee River Cult,"
The
Journal of American Folklore 13 (January-March 1900): 48.
[169] Sarah Tuttle, Letters from the Chickasaw
and Osage Missions, (n.p., 1921), 9-10.
[170] Chickamagua Journal quoted in H.T.
Malone, Cherokees of the Old South: A People in Transition (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1956), 142.
[171] Wright, The Only Land They Knew,
248-290.
[172] Lucinda Davis in Works Progress Administration:
Oklahoma Writers Project, Slave Narratives (Washington: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1932) 58.
[173] Preston Kyles in Works Progress Administration:
Arkansas Writers Project, Slave Narratives (Washington: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1932) 220.
[174] Jack Campbell in George Rawick, ed.
The
American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood
Press, 1972), 92.
[175] Wright, Creeks and Seminoles,
95.
[176] bell hooks, "Revolutionary Renegades:
Native Americans, African Americans, and Black Indians" in Black Looks:
Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 183.
[177] Kiziah Love in Works Progress Administration:
Oklahoma Writers Project, Slave Narratives (Washington: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1932), 196.
[178] Freeman, 29.
[179] Wright, Creeks and Seminoles,
81; Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: Creek-Indian Trade
with Anglo-America, 1685-1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1993), 46.
[180] Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 81.
[181] Freeman, 30-33.
[182] Among the Native Americans of Southeastern
Virginia from whence David George fled, there was a very strong Aframerindian
community. Thomas Jefferson noted that among the Mattaponies, there was
"more negro than Indian blood in them." The Gingaskin, Nottoway, and Pamunkeys
were often asserted to be more Black than Indian. (Porter, Relations,
314).
In a later period, many of the Powhatans were suspected of being in league
with Nat Turner and supporting his runaways following the insurrection
of 1831. Many of the Powhatan Indians served the Union forces of the Civil
War during guerilla activities in Southeastern Virginia. (Lawrence Hauptmann,
Between
Two Fires: American Indians in the Civil War (New York: Free Press,
1995), 66-73).
[183] Mechal Sobel, Trabelin On: The Slave
Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979), 105.
[184] Schomburg, 398.
[185] Freeman, 27.
[186] Albert Raboteau, Slave religion
: the "invisible institution" in the Antebellum South (New York : Oxford
University Press, 1978), 142.
[187] Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 81.
[188] Letter of Andrew Bryan to Reverend
Doctor Rippon in Milton Sernett, ed., Afro-American Religious History:
A Documentary Witness (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), 49.
[189] Irene Blocker in Rawick, 189.
[190] Raleigh Wilson, Negro and Indian
Relations 1865-1907 (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1949), 22.
[191] House Reports, No. 30, 39th
Congress, 1st Session, Washington, 1867, Pt. IV, Vol. II, 162.
[192] Nellie Johnson in Works Progress Administration:
Oklahoma Writers Project, Slave Narratives (Washington: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1932), 157.
[193] Oklahoma Historical Society, Indian-Pioneer
History, Vol. 108: 213 .
[194] Cherokee Chief Yonaguska, upon reading
chapters of Matthew in Cherokee commented, "well, it seems to be a good
book- strange that the white people are not better, after having had it
so long." Yonaguska quoted in Douglas Right, The American Indian in
North Carolina [Second Printing](Winston-Salem: John F. Blair, 1987),
204.
[195] Cudjo quoted in Perdue, 106; For an
excellent description of the diversity of Cherokee society prior to removal,
see William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 343-349.
[196] Malone, 108-11
[197] McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries,
160-161.
It is sad to note the blindness of many authors to the multiracial makeup
of the "slave community." In extensive works on slave religion such as
Albert Raboteau's Slave religion : the "invisible institution" in the
Antebellum South (New York : Oxford University Press, 1978), Lawrence
Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977), or Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll: The
World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), the presence
of African American/Native American cultural intermixture is ignored. It
is even more glaring when someone like Michel Sobel, whose Trabelin'
On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1979) ignored Native Americans, writes The World They
Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth Century (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987) as if there was no other presence in
Virginia. This ignorance might be excusable if they groundwork for such
multiethnic explorations had not been laid by Carter G. Woodson, John Hope
Franklin, James Hugo Johnston, Henry Wiggins Porter, and Daniel Littlefield.
It is also important at this point no just to mention Indian/Black affinities,
but to stress the unifying nature of folk religion in the Old South. For
excellent articles, see Avery Cravern "Poor Whites and Negroes in the Antebellum
South" in The Journal of Negro History XV (No. 1, January, 1930):
14-25; Newbell N. Puckett, "Religious Folk Beliefs of Whites and Negroes,"
in The Journal of Negro History XVI (No. 1, January, 1931): 9-35.
[198] Carter G. Woodson, "Freedom and Slavery
in Appalachian America" in The Journal of Negro History I (No. 1,
January, 1916): 142.
[199] Woodson, "Freedom and Slavery in Appalachian
America," 145.
[200] Ibid.
[201] Mooney, 183. The name for Cherokee
meaning "cave dwellers" comes from the Choctaw word chiluk. If we
think of "cave dwellers" within the contexts of a religion based upon the
temple mound culture, it provides us with an interesting etymology. It
is also interesting to consider briefly the irony of African Americans
fleeing slavery hiding out in what amounts to temple mounds. It would prove
fascinating were it to be discovered that a temple mound were actually
a station on the underground railroad.
[202] Quakers in North Carolina were able
to convince many slave owners and planters in North Carolina not only to
turn over their slaves to the American Colonization Society but to pay
for their transit to Liberia. In his work The American Colonization
Society: 1817-1840, Early Fox states, "So efficient were the North
Carolina Quakers in their cooperation with the Society, that they alone
seemed able to supply all of the emigrants that could be accommodated with
the limited means of the Colonizationists." (Early Lee Fox, The American
Colonization Society: 1817-1840,(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1919),
43.)
[203] Woodson, "Freedom and Slavery in Appalachian
America," 143.
[204] "An Address to the People of North
Carolina on the Evils of Slavery" quoted in Carl Degler, The Other South:
Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper Torchbooks,
1974), 21. The presence of large numbers of Quakers in North Carolina and
Tennessee played a profound role in the development of anti-slavery sentiments.
Benjamin Lundy estimated in 1827 that there were 106 anti-slavery societies
in the South as compared with 24 in the Northern states. (Degler, 21)
[205] Woodson, "Freedom and Slavery in Appalachian
America," 143.
[206] Woodson, "Freedom and Slavery in Appalachian
America," 144.
[207] William Chamberlain to Jeremiah Everts,
January 8, 1929, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,
Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions [microform].
(Woodbridge, Conn. : Research Publications, 1982);. Chamberlain
wrote, "I have assisted the black people in Wills Valley in forming themselves
into a society called the Wills Valley African Benevolent Society... They
have raised ten dollars for the American Colonization Society. Although
the society was made up of blacks, there is evidence that the Society was
supported by the larger community. See also Cherokee Phoenix
(Number
38, October 8, 1838).
[208] American State Papers II, 651
[209] Malone, 118.
[210] Angie Debo, A History of the Indians
of the United States (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press,1970), 113.
[211] Cherokee Nation, Laws of the Cherokee
Nation adopted by the Council at various periods [1808-1835] : printed
for the benefit of the nation (Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation: Cherokee
Advocate Office, 1852), 119.
[212] Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop:
Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1986), 36.
[213] Michael Roethler, 135-136.
[214] Andrew Jackson quoted in Grant Foreman,
Indian
Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932), 235.
[215] McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries,
264. The connection was not lost upon later historians, as Carter G. Woodson
stated in his The Negro in Our History, "The agitation for the return
of the Negro slaves, moreover, was kept up through this period, as a reason
for removal, inasmuch as the Indians were disinclined to return fugitive
Negroes who had become connected with them by blood." (Carter G. Woodson,
The
Negro in Our History (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1922),
193).
[216] Wright, Creeks and Seminoles,
232.
[217] Wright, Creeks and Seminoles,
226.
[218] Elizur Butler to David Green, March
14, 1832, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Papers
of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions [microform].
(Woodbridge, Conn. : Research Publications, 1982);
[219] Robert Walker, Torchlights to the
Cherokees (New York: MacMillan Company,1931), 298-299.
[220] Elizur Butler to David Green, March
5, 1845, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Papers
of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions [microform].
(Woodbridge, Conn. : Research Publications, 1982);.
[221] Russell Thornton, The Cherokees:
A Population History (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990), 52.
[222] Lewis Johnson in Works Progress Administration:Arkansas
Writers Project, Slave Narratives, (Washington: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1932), 100.
[223] Eliza Whitmire in Rawick, 380-381.
[224] Patriarch Abraham in Works Progress
Administration: Alabama Writers Project, Slave Narratives, (Washington:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1932), 1-2.
[225] Eliza Hendrick in Rawick, 137-138.
[226] "Daniel Butrick's Journal," February,
1838, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Papers of
the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions [microform].
(Woodbridge, Conn. : Research Publications, 1982);
[227] Mooney, 124.
[228] Foreman, 290; Roethler, 150.
[229] "Daniel Buttrick's Journal," July 1838,
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Papers of the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions [microform]. (Woodbridge,
Conn. : Research Publications, 1982);
[230] Ibid.
[231] Buttrick, August 1838.
[232] Roethler, 150.
[233] Buttrick, March 1838.
[234] Russell Thornton, The Cherokees:
A Population History (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press,1990), 118.
[235] Porter, Relations, 50-51.
[236] Perdue, "Indians in Southern History,"
149.
[237] Executive Documents, 25th Congress,
2nd Session, 1837-1838, (Vol iii, no. 78):52
[238] Giddings, 119.
[239] Many reports state the cause of the
Second Seminole War was the seizure of Osceola's African wife by merchants
who sought to sell her back into slavery. Opothoyohela was to go on to
lead a Maroon community in their flight from the Creek Nation to Kansas
during the Civil War.
[240] Executive Documents, 25th Congress,
3rd Session, 1838, (No. 225): 51.
[241] Jessup quoted in Mulroy, 31.
[242] Ibid.
[243] Mary Hill interview, Oklahoma Historical
Society, Indian-Pioneer History (Vol. 5): 106-107.
[244] Wright, Creeks and Seminoles,
283.
[245] Nathaniel Willis interview, Oklahoma
Historical Society, Indian-Pioneer Papers (Vol. 50): 117.
[246] Mulroy, 33; Grant Foreman, Indian
removal: the emigration of the five civilized tribes of Indians (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1932), 265-275.
[247] Mankiller, 46.
[248] J.M. Gaskins, History of Black Baptists
in Oklahoma, (Oklahoma City: Messenger Press, 1992), 84 ; Kenneth W.
Porter, "Negroes on the Southern Frontier." Journal of Negro History
33 (1948): 53-78; Jimmie Lewis Franklin, The Blacks of Oklahoma
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 2; See also Arthur
L. Tolson, Black Oklahomans: A History 1541-1972( New Orleans: 1974);
Eugene Richards, "Trends of Negro Life in Oklahoma as Reflected by Census
Reports" in Journal of Negro History 33 (1948): 38-52; Kay M. Teall,
ed. Black History in Oklahoma: A Resource Book (Oklahoma City, OK:
1971); Eugene Coke Routh, The Story of Oklahoma Baptists. (Oklahoma
City: Baptist General Convention, 1932); William Loren Katz, Black Indians:
a Hidden Heritage, (New York: Atheneum, 1986); William Loren Katz,
The
Negro on the American frontier ( New York: Arno Press and the New York
Times, 1971); John Boles, ed., Black Southerners, 1619-1869 (Lexington,
Ky. : University Press of Kentucky, c1983); Daniel Littlefield,
The
Cherokee freedmen: from emancipation to American citizenship. (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978).
[249] Russell Thornton, The Cherokees:
A Population History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1990),
89.
[250] Evan Jones reports that one hundred
and seventy people were converted during the revivals in the concentration
camps and one hundred and thirty were baptised into the church upon their
arrival in Indian Territory. "Report of Evan Jones" in American Baptist
Missionary Union Annual Report, 1841, 51.
[251] Letter from Rev. Evan Jones, in Baptist
Missionary Magazine, XVIII, 236.
[252] Jesse Bushyhead, quoted in Foreman,
Indian
Removal, 103.
[253] Jesse Bushyhead quoted in Carl Coke
Rister, Baptist Missions among the American Indians (Atlanta: Southern
Baptist Church Home Mission Board, 1944), 77.
