Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country by Fay A. Yarbrough

Abstract

Reviewed by: Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country by Fay A. Yarbrough Clarissa W. Confer Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country. By Fay A. Yarbrough. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 280. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) This slim volume traces the Choctaws’ wartime experience in a few chapters, which are book-ended by other chapters covering traditional Choctaw culture and the Reconstruction period, including an unpersuasive foray into the imagined effect of war on masculinity. The author’s research entails a fairly standard use of available sources—tribal nation papers, the Indian-Pioneer Papers collection at the University of Oklahoma, W.P.A. narratives, and government records—that I, Mary Jane Warde, and others have also used in analyzing the nations of Indian Territory in the mid-nineteenth century. In this case, Fay Yarbrough looks at the material through the lens of slavery and race relations. Her expressed intent to connect this past to issues of the present sets the tone for her work. The book begins with a standard history of the Choctaw people, explaining traditional aspects of social structure, such as matrilineal descent and the role of clans. Like so many Native groups, the Choctaws experienced extensive change in the nineteenth century, brought on primarily by White expansion westward. One example is gender roles. As the century progressed, Native women lost their status as agricultural producers. Although the author attributes this entirely to the development of slavery, this change actually stems from a wide range of factors, most notably White male expectations. In that and many other ways, Choctaw society began to look more like White southern culture. The Choctaw were one of the five Native nations removed to Indian Territory from the southeastern United States who practice slavery; however, because enslaved people made up only 14 percent of the Choctaw population by 1860, a much smaller percentage than in any of its neighboring states, there are marked differences between Choctaw culture and the Deep South. Unlike in slave states, the Choctaw nation had a path for citizenship for slaves through blood ties to a Choctaw. Deep South plantations would have looked very different had White masters offered citizenship to blood relations among their slaves. Like their slaveholding neighbors, however, the Choctaw also tightened the legal structure governing bondage in the post-Nat Turner period of the 1830s. Although Choctaw citizens’ engagement in this slave economy influenced their decision to participate in the Civil War, this was only one of several such influences. The question of how and why Indian nations chose sides in the national conflict has been examined and debated in many books, and Yarbrough revisits that question. The core principle for all the nations was tribal sovereignty, and the attractive alliance package offered by Confederate leaders seemed the best way to preserve it. The Choctaw followed a path [End Page 124] similar to the Cherokees, seeking neutrality first, eventually allying with the Confederacy, and then forming armed mounted units for the Confederate army. The author leans heavily on Cherokee history to flesh out the story of the Choctaw, but the problem with this strategy is that the Cherokee were uniquely divided by the removal experience, and those fissures shaped their responses. In contrast to the Cherokee, the Choctaw remained loyal to the Confederacy throughout the war, despite breeches of treaty promises. The Confederacy, for that matter, did not adequately support any of its Native allies, resulting in poor wartime conditions, desertions, and leadership lapses among them. The Civil War in Indian Territory, as scholars have been arguing for decades, devolved into an internal civil war. No Native nation gained from the experience. The Choctaw location on the southern edge of Indian Territory made that area a popular destination for a flow of refugees from the war, which put corresponding pressures on the nation, although that is not discussed here. Even so, the Choctaw maintained their unity throughout the war. Unfortunately, the chapter about Reconstruction focuses only on the Choctaw freedpeople and does not examine the intriguing situation in which Choctaws negotiated a more favorable peace treaty than the other nations who fought the United States. The...