Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South

by Barbara Krauthamer

From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes' removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory. The tribes formulated racial and gender ideologies that justified this practice and marginalized free black people in the Indian nations well after the Civil War and slavery had ended. Through the end of the nineteenth century, ongoing conflicts among Choctaw, Chickasaw, and U.S. lawmakers left untold numbers of former slaves and their descendants in the two Indian nations without citizenship in either the Indian nations or the United States. In this groundbreaking study, Barbara Krauthamer rewrites the history of southern slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native American slaveholders and the black people they enslaved.
Krauthamer's examination of slavery and emancipation highlights the ways Indian women's gender roles changed with the arrival of slavery and changed again after emancipation and reveals complex dynamics of race that shaped the lives of black people and Indians both before and after removal.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, Indigenous, Politics, Historical, Book Club

211 pages, Hardcover

First published June 17, 2013

Reviews

[David Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

That many Native Americans once owned African-American slaves is, or should be, common knowledge. That most of these slave-owners belonged to the “Five Civilized Tribes” of the southeast should come as no surprise. That their enslaved dependents’ experiences differed in some respects from those of white owners should not surprise us either, but until quite recently few historians have studied those experiences in depth. Barbara Krauthamer's BLACK SLAVES, INDIAN MASTERS provides a thoughtful study of this subject. It proves particularly useful because the author focuses on two Indian nations, the Chickasaws and Choctaws, who generally receive little scholarly attention, and because she discusses African-American lives both before and after Indian Removal (the usual stopping point for studies of southeastern Indians), indeed all the way to the twentieth century.

Krauthamer follows other ethnohistorians in observing that the Chickasaws and Choctaws had developed thoroughly commercial societies by the early 1800s. The two nations sold food and livestock to whites in order to accumulate capital, which many then invested in farming improvements and slaves. Tribal land sales also financed the purchase of bondsmen; many Chickasaws, for instance, sold the land allotments they'd received in their 1832 Removal treaty to buy enslaved people. Slave labor helped the two nations survive Removal and retain their movable property, as African-Americans drove their Indian masters' livestock and transported their goods. After Removal, the economic revival that the Choctaws and Chickasaws organized in Indian Territory rested on slave labor, as well as cotton production and steam transportation (pp. 27-32, 39-44, 79-80).

Slavery underwrote such prosperity as the Chickasaws and Choctaws enjoyed before the Civil War, but it also altered power relations within both nations. The institution concentrated wealth in the hands of rich families, and it augmented patriarchy by deforming gender relations, giving Indian men direct control over (black) women's agricultural labor and allowing them to feminize enslaved male field hands. Indian men and women used violence to control slaves, and terror and vigilantism to control freedmen after the Civil War. Choctaw and Chickasaw leaders increasingly used race to define national identity: Indians could not be owned, African-Americans could, and free blacks, who occupied an anomalous place between the two, were unwelcome. (pp. 33-36, 71, 80, 111, 123).

Appropriately, Krauthamer devotes considerable attention to the lives of African-Americans in Choctaw and Chickasaw country, and how they fought against social death and second-class citizenship. In the antebellum era Choctaw and Chickasaw slaves found allies among white missionaries, who employed them as interpreters and laborers and encouraged them to attend religious services. Some learned to read and write at the missions, or earned enough money working there to buy their freedom. Those who lacked this option or suffered under particularly abusive masters could run away, usually to Texas, or retaliate for planters' violence with violence of their own. This became particularly true during the Civil War, when some slaves acquired arms or set up refugee camps on Union-controlled territory (pp. 57-69, 89-90, 97, 100-105).

After the war, the Chickasaws and Choctaws grudgingly agreed to emancipate their slaves, lest the U.S. government set up a freedmen's colony in Indian Territory, but they balked at giving them citizenship. Freedmen themselves regarded Indian Territory as “our native country” and pressed for incorporation into the southern Indian nations' body politic. More specifically, they sought citizenship and the right to own land. They enjoyed some success at reaching the first goal: in the 1880s the Choctaws granted freedmen suffrage and limited office-holding rights, though the Chickasaws refused to do so. Many freedmen also obtained land allotments, which the nations had promised them under treaties with the United States; usually these were too undeveloped to support freedmen and their families, and most supplemented their allotments with sharecropping. Separation and exclusion remained, however, essential parts of the freedmen's experience, especially after the Dawes Commission (1897-1907) classified them as a separate group within the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations, and after the new state of Oklahoma subjected them to Jim Crow (117, 124-28, 137-141, 149-50).

BLACK SLAVES, INDIAN MASTERS stands well on its own, but the author also seeks to contribute to a historiographical debate over slavery in Native North America. Like Claudio Saunt and Tiya Miles, and contra Theda Perdue and Christina Snyder, Krauthamer argues that slavery and the repression that accompanied it did not have very deep roots in southeastern Indian society, and that nineteenth-century slave-owners brought racism and the other pathologies of Southern society into Chickasaw and Choctaw country. Whether this only applied to wealthy elites or whether these attitudes became widespread among the Choctaws and Chickasaws is not a question this book tries to answer, except to imply that the latter is true. If so, what mechanisms conveyed these racial views from slave-owners to non-elites? And how does one explain the difference in racial attitudes between the Choctaws, who extended limited citizenship to freedmen, and the Chickasaws, who refused to do so, and who incidentally had a higher rate of slave ownership? Recent debates over freedmen's descendants' eligibility for tribal citizenship suggest that these questions remain quite relevant in Indian country today.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating, short book about the understudied field of “Indian”/indigenous ownership of African slaves, a topic I have never thought about but an interesting chapter in American history nonetheless. The book is about slave ownership by the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes specifically, treating them as a case study and situating them within a broader context. The book is dense and not super digestible. Overall, a super interesting read.

The book traces the Choctaw and Chickasaw and their ownership of slaves beginning in the early 1880s through the Trail of Tears and sectional crisis of the 1850s and ending with the Civil War. The Choctaw and Chickasaw did not own chattel slaves prior to colonization, instead they seized captives during wartime as a means of obtaining spiritual and physical replacement for loved ones lost in war. As the French and British colonized the Americas, the Choctaw and Chickasaw increasingly sought captives to supply the slave trade in exchange for fabrics, guns, and other commodities. As they inserted themselves into the business of chattel slavery as traders and slave catchers, they also themselves became slaveholders. Buying and selling enslaved people marked a dramatic shift in Choctaw and Chickasaw ideas and practices of property, race, and gender. Slaveholders embraced a racial and gender ideology of black inferiority that informed their relationship with each other, their slaves, and non-slaveholding natives. Slaveholding by indigenous people was also closely observed and encouraged by the United States, who believed that slave ownership would hasten their process of assimilation by enhancing their understanding of the dynamics of property ownership and commercial gain.

The book explores what the enslaved experience under Choctaw and Chickasaw ownership was like and how their legal rights was structured by the tribes' relationship with the United States. The book touches upon fascinating legal and political questions raised by indigenous ownership of black slaves. For example, questions of jurisdiction and property rights when enslaved people on either side of the Indian territory-US border fled into the neighboring territory or questions of whether slaves should be considered "mere portable property" or as people when calculating disbursement of food, blankets, and money for slave-owning indigenous households facing forced removal West.

The book also explores the role of Christianity and white missionaries in Choctaw and Chickasaw slaveholding. Missionaries were often anti-slavery and slaves got involved with them out of self-interest as attending church provided a temporary respite from the totalizing control of the plantation. Missionaries also taught slaves how to read and write and sometimes paid for their freedom. Christianity was also how enslaved and freed Africans became acquainted with the American Colonization Society, causing some to emigrate to Liberia to escape marginalization in Indian Country and the US.

The latter half of the book focuses on the Civil War and its ramifications. The Choctaw and Chickasaw both aligned with the Confederacy in 1861 in order to both defend slavery and their national sovereignty. When the Civil War came to an end, the 13th Amendment did not free Choctaw and Chickasaw slaves as it did not apply to Indian Territory. Instead, slavery in Indian Territory had to be abolished through treaty negotiations after the war. However, although the issue of black citizenship was negotiated as part of the treaties, freedmen struggled to secure citizenship with the tribal and federal governments. Freedmen regarded Indian Territory as their native country and pressed for incorporation into the Indian nations' body politic. It wasn't until the Dawes Act, which asserted federal control over Indian Territory and divided tribal reservation lands into individual plots, was this question resolved and freedmen got US citizenship.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a good starting point for the topic of Native Americans enslaving people of African descent. It focuses primarily on the Choctaw and Chickasaw, and examines issues of citizenship recognition, sovereignty, land rights, and disenfranchisement. Krauthamer does a fantastic job in articulating why and how the history of enslavement in the US needs to be recontexualized with the understanding that Native Americans were involved from the beginning, and in some cases enthusiastic participants for complex reasons. I highly recommend this book.

[tana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not many books that focus on this topic that I’m aware of and while the reader tends to yearn for greater detail one needs only to remember the populations being discussed. We’re lucky to have records at all. Quite an interesting intersection where oppressed turns on oppressed in the system of things that remains a foundational issue to this day. For everyone.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important reading. Stuff they definitely didn't address in history class in school. It focuses much more on the tribes and their treaties and dealings than it does with the lives of the enslaved people. That may be due to what kind of records we have. Would recommend reading, though.

[Rachel Jackson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Black Slaves, Indian Masters was set up to be a look at the racial hierarchy of three races and classes in the American South: white government leaders, Indian landowners, and black slaves. Barbara Krauthamer puts the relationships among these three groups under a lens in this book, trying to explain the complicated legal matters and territorial red tape that comes along with the conquering of bodies and lands during the Antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction eras. However, she doesn't make the connection about why we should care or, for that matter, why telling the story of slavery from this new angle is important.

Krauthamer is very clearly an academic, which is certainly not a bad thing, but she does not know how to translate research to writing; she throws plenty of ideas, knowledge, facts, research, primary sources, etc., down on the page, but she fails to go the step further and explain it in a way that is engaging and relevant to the reader. The book seemed to be fairly pointless to me—by which I mean it didn't have a clear point or focus or concentration. The topic—that of Native Americans, largely in the Five Civilized Tribes, holding slaves—is hugely important and overlooked in the study of U.S. history. But the author only makes random points and throws in some testimony here and there without making connections. It's a topic rich with information, as Krauthamer describes the Trail of Tears move from the Southeastern United States over to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. It could have been a book about how the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes negotiated holding slaves, balancing their cultures, economies and beliefs, while also dealing with the constant threat of assimilation and termination from the U.S. government. It could have been a book about identify and culture, the Choctaw and Chickasaw trying to maintain their own, while black slaves desperately tried to claim their own and stick to it in the midst of severe slavery from the Native Americans.

But Krauthamer did none of that. I was hoping the book would be more about the relationship between the black slaves and Indian masters, as the title suggests, perhaps talking about how slavery influenced Native social structures, or how white culture influenced black people and Natives in this particular setting. There is a little of the latter toward the end of the book, and in the context of religion, but it's pretty sparse. Furthermore, I was confused by Krauthamer's tone, because she clearly is more interested in the slaves than the slaveholders here, but she fails to mention much about the white people's influence over anything at all. The Five Civilized Tribes certainly didn't have slavery before a certain point in their white contact, and yet Krauthamer doesn't mention anything about this; she doesn't talk about how Indian nations were affected by the advent of slavery; she only goes straight into saying that the Choctaw and Chickasaw were just as bad as white slaveholders. Which isn't to say they weren't, but the culture differences should have been more fleshed out. Indian tribes in the 19th century were hugely different culturally, socially and religiously from overarching white culture, and this would have been a better lens through which to write about this topic, but Krauthamer did not deliver at all. Which is a shame. This is an important topic, but it was discussed very poorly here.

[Jody · Rating 2 out of 5]

I became interested in this topic after watching a documentary on Black Wall Street and the Tulsa race massacres. I was unaware that Native Americans owned and brought slaves to Indian Territory when they were relocated from the south. I assumed I would discover Native Americans treated slaves better than their white counterparts, but this was not the case. The concept of slavery was not new to Native Americans, however, most slaves would have been male captives from wars with other tribes. The women and children who were captured were generally adopted into the tribe. The purchase and sale of human beings, in this case Africans and African Americans, was introduced to the Native Americans by white settlers. During the civil war, the Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes primarily fought on the side of the Confederacy in an attempt to maintain their sovereignty and preserve their land. Following the war and the emancipation proclamation, the federal government forced treaties requiring the Choctaw and Chickasaw to grant citizenship and land to their freed slaves despite the US government failing to do the same. "The Chickasaw people cannot see any reason or just cause why they should be required to do more for their freed slaves than the white people have done in the slaveholding states for theirs." - Chickasaw governor Jonas Wolf. The US government used the alloting of Choctaw and Chickasaw land to freed slaves as just another measure to take their territory from them. There is good information in this book, but it reads like a textbook or doctoral thesis.

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid, well-researched monograph on the history of slavery in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations. Krauthamer takes a balanced, nuanced approach to this topic that acknowledges American colonization and dispossession of Indigenous peoples but never uses it to excuse the fact of Native American enslavement of Africans. Rather, treating the Choctaw and Chickasaw people as independent, autonomous political actors makes it possible to hold them accountable for their treatment, exploitation, and abuse of Black people. I learned a lot in this book, especially how treaty negotiations and contestations over Native sovereignty were so tied up with the questions of slavery and Black citizenship. I didn't know a number of Indigenous peoples had actually sided with the Confederacy either. This is definitely a topic that more people should learn about as it seems like many US Americans at the time knew of chattel slavery in Native American nations but far fewer people today are aware of this. I would have also loved to read some of the first-person accounts by the formerly enslaved and their descendants that were quoted throughout the book too.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an eye opening book for me. It is a brief account of the institution of chattel slavery amongst the Native American nations, how it came about (and how it differed from enslavement as was practiced before Native Americans came to acquire black slaves), how it was far from benign, and quite violent, and how the civil war and reconstruction affected the history of enslaved people in the Native American nations. Well worth reading.

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essential reading for anyone interested in indigenous enslavement of African descended people. Important intersection of Native American history, African American history, and the history of the American South

[Andrew Pemberton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite being self-proclaimed as a work of African American History, this book is much more a piece of Native American historiography.

[Think-On-It]

If you'd like to know what I thought of this book, please contact me directly and I'd be happy to discuss it with you.

All the best,

- TB

[Charlie Bavis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good. I liked that a lot of it centered Black voice from the context Krauthamer was describing. Left me pessimistic tbh.

[Hollis]

This is a very strong historical work that explores some lesser known dynamics of American property-race-sovereignty relations between Black, White, and Indigenous groups centrally during the late mid-late 19th century. Though, this is an area that I'm not so familiar with, so maybe the work is more striking to me than for others. For example, I really liked chapter two, which examined the impact of religiosity and missionary work on the mobility and social currency afforded to enslaved Black people in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations. I also particularly liked chapter three, which complicates the common argument that White Supremacy both took Native land and worked the land with Black labor- the chapter complicates that narrative by providing details on how enslaves Blacks where taken by tribes after Native Removal and used to work the new territory lands, which shows how Native peoples were complicit in using Black labor to work the land as well. How one responds to such an intervention depends on how you're going to read the influence of American coercion on Natives to adopt slave labor and enter the market economy. Overall, I learned a lot from this and found it quite easy to read. Krauthamer is most invested in reading the impact of this history on the lives of enslaves and freed Blacks, but her book should be acknowledged as important for not just African, but Native and American history too.

[Oswaldo Angeles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being a Mexican, I was completely unaware of Indian slaveholders. This is an enlightening book, covering an often overlooked subject, specially about the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribe on Indian Territory.

Slavery existed in indian tribes before white colonialism, but it was rather a war captives dynamic. After the establishment of slavery as an economical benefit by white intervention, indians transitioned to a market- oriented vision of slavery. A revealing part was the significance of chattel slavery for indians and how they treated their slaves. Some narratives depict indians as somehow lax masters, but through the author's and anthropologists investigations, I learned that indian slaveholders could be as cruel as their white equivalent. They had little tolerance for runaways and showed faint mercy, even offering rewards for their scalps.

The downside of this book might be that the author often falls short when trying to bring together ideas, facts and testimonies. It feels like an overly academic book at some points, being a little bit tedious.

Nonetheless, this book will help you to know more about a subject that should be common knowledge, showing that relationships of oppression are a complex matter with multilevel branches and hues, offering a wide view of history as a contest for power.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barbara Krauthamer tackles black slavery on Native American lands in a more carefully sourced manner than Fay Yarbrough did in "Race and the Cherokee Nation." Krauthamer explains how the Chickasaw & Choctaw, also residing on the Indian Territory that became Oklahoma, didn't repeal slavery until 1866. Even then, emancipation was at the Union's behest, black freedmen living outside the territory weren't given time to move back and apply for citizenship, and the Chickasaw & Choctaw were reluctant to grant equal legal rights to the freedmen. The disgruntled freedmen organized politically on Choctaw and Chickasaw lands to a greater degree than freedmen did in the Cherokee Nation. Finally, the freedmen got full equality in 1887, but this came only as the Dawes Act split apart the tribal governments and forced Native Americans onto small allotments of land. Like Yarbrough, Krauthamer writes to show that the descendants of black freedmen have a legitimate claim to citizenship in several Native American nations.

[Brandon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was interesting, but took me a while to get through--not because it was hard to read or long, as it was neither. Had some interesting points:

(1) Oklahoma was "Indian Country";
(2) the Indians in Oklahoma had slaves and were on the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War;
(3) slavery continued among the Indians in OK even after the Civil War until a Treaty in 1866.

The Indians (mostly Choctaw and Chickasaw in this book) looked down on black people ... and white people. I was a little fascinated at the viewpoints of the Indians and the white people who were squatting on their lands (especially in Mississippi), stealing their property, or marrying their people.

Beyond that, I didn't get a lot out of the book.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Krauthamer for my Unpacking 1619 Discussion group.

Professor Barbara Krauthamer discusses her book, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, which examines the role of slavery in the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations. She explores the tensions brought these Native American tribes by missionaries, trade, and the "civilizing" project of Euro-Americans. The role of slavery as a form of assimilation which Native Americans hoped would enrich them as well as protect their territorial sovereignty. This complicated history is illustrated with all the contradictions and failures which resonate, still, today.

Check it out here

[Peyton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, this one certainly taught me a lot about the enslaved African-American experience before and after the Indian Removal Act! I didn't realize that some Native Americans had plantations set up in the South before their removal. This concentrated on the Chickasaws and Choctaws and how they used race to define themselves as different from African-Americans (this wasn't unique to them however). They also resisted emancipation and giving citizenship to freedmen, and this debate still goes on today. The conclusion included the fact that "the Choctaw constitution of 1983 effectively disenfranchised descendants of former slaves."

The writing was academic, but overall it made for interesting book club discussion.

[Kidada · Rating 4 out of 5]

Krauthamer does a great job of illuminating the role chattel slavery played in Choctaw and Chickasaw communities and how enslaved people experienced bondage, removal, the Civil War, emancipation, and removal within this part of Indian Territory. This book is one of many recent texts that unspools a lot of the myths that exist about a uniform solidarity among people of African descent and Native peoples informed by similar racial oppression across American history. This isn't to say that there weren't some alliances because there were but as is often the case, the real history is more complicated.

[Karen]

* Understanding Oppression: African American Rights (Then and Now)

From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes' removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory. #slavery #indian #history #americans #civilwar