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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country by Faye A. Yarbrough Andrew K. Frank (bio) Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country. Faye A. Yarbrough. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4696-6511-5, 280 pp., cloth, $32.95. In the early nineteenth century, the Choctaws faced unrelenting efforts by Southern states and politicians to dissolve their government, steal their land, and evict them from their homelands in Alabama and Mississippi. By early 1861, only decades after its forced removal west, the Choctaw Nation had allied itself with the Confederacy and those who had only recently declared that the South had no place for Native Americans. In Choctaw Confederates, historian Faye A. Yarbrough unravels this contradiction by exploring the importance of slavery and tribal sovereignty to nineteenth-century Choctaw society. Yarbrough primarily uses treaties, council meeting records, and laws to explain the development of nineteenth-century Choctaw society and ultimately [End Page 331] explain the decision of the nation to ally with the Confederacy. Yarbrough incorporates the voices of the enslaved and nonelite Choctaws and has mined military service records to discuss the enthusiasm and experiences of soldiers during the war. Most of the volume, however, focuses on those involved in making the political decisions and voicing official explanations. Yarbrough’s conclusions will often feel familiar to scholars of the Confederacy, but they consistently appear as peculiarly Choctaw variations. Yarbrough begins Choctaw Confederates with a sustained discussion of how slavery transformed and permeated Choctaw society prior to forced removal and in the following decades in Indian Territory. This discussion uses the Records of the Choctaw Council Meetings as well as interviews later recorded by the Works Progress Administration and in the Indian Pioneer History Collection to augment a rich secondary literature. As Choctaws increasingly became market-oriented enslavers, they wrote new laws that eroded traditional clan obligations and redefined property. Yarbrough argues that Choctaws pursued these changes to protect the interests of enslavers as well as to convince Southern and federal governments that the Choctaws were “independent and sovereign, with a distinct culture and identity” (13). Like white enslavers to the east, the council restricted literacy for enslaved people and enacted other legal restrictions on Blacks in the nation. Simultaneously, it defended the Choctaws’ sovereign boundaries and the property of Choctaw wives by regulating marriages with white outsiders. Yarbrough’s examination of the Choctaws’ decision to form an alliance with the Confederacy emphasizes their fear over the future of both slavery and tribal sovereignty. Council members, for example, worried that federal policies toward Kansas and Nebraska left Choctaw land claims in a precarious situation. They also concluded that the creation of the Confederacy dissolved the US government and thereby rendered all past treaties meaningless. These fears, Yarbrough explains, shaped the Choctaw Nation’s negotiations with the Confederacy. It unsuccessfully sought political representation and statehood in the Confederacy, but it won many concessions from the Confederacy that acknowledged their sovereignty. In addition, Choctaws “hoped that a strong commitment to states’ rights would translate into respecting Native sovereignty rights as well” (2). Yarbrough’s discussion of Choctaw soldiers and their motivations offers the book’s most novel contribution. These discussions, as well as her vivid reconstruction of the experiences and observations of the enslaved, push Yarbrough away from the volume’s focus on elite leaders and political discourse. Her analysis of the service records of the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles [End Page 332] reveals a nation whose men appear more eager to enlist than white Southerners and whose zeal for fighting waned as the conflict continued. This argument rests, in part, on the number and percentage of Choctaw enlistees. Without a draft to coerce service, the Choctaws mustered 3,100 soldiers (20 percent) of its non-enslaved population, according to Yarbrough’s calculation. This number is significantly higher than the modern Choctaw Nation’s estimate of 1,200 and slightly higher than estimates for the United States and the Confederacy. Yarbrough’s total, though, is certainly inflated as it includes some Chickasaws, “likely some duplication” of records and “soldiers . . . [who] were also white” (118, 119). Her discussion of Choctaw...