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Opinion: Choctaw Nation faced a big decision on eve of Civil War
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Filed Under: Opinion


"During the first week of February, while gentlemen from across the South convened in Montgomery, Ala., to establish a new nation, a meeting of another, far older nation was happening 500 miles to the west. Instead of taking place under the lofty dome of a neoclassical capitol, this one was held in a simple wooden council house, on the red clay banks of a muddy creek near what is now the Texas-Oklahoma border. Here the tribal leaders of the Choctaw Nation gathered to debate their future.

No detailed description of that council session survives. But the Choctaws on the eve of the Civil War were a heterogeneous, sometimes fractious people, poised at an intersection of races and cultures, of new ways and old ones. Here is how a white missionary described a gathering in Doaksville, the tribe’s capital, a few years earlier:

There were cabins, tents, booths, stores, shanties, wagons, carts, campfires; white, red, black and mixed in every imaginable shade and proportion and dressed in every conceivable variety of style, from tasty American clothes to the wild costumes of the Indians; buying, selling, swapping, betting, shooting, strutting, talking, laughing, fiddling, eating, drinking, smoking, sleeping, seeing and being seen, all bundled together.

Now the Choctaws’ elected representatives – like the leaders of many other native tribes across the South – faced a momentous decision: Whether to remain loyal to the United States or cast their lot with the new and untested Confederate States of America.

There was no obvious answer. After all, the United States had not always been quite loyal to the Choctaws. In the previous century, the tribe, then living mostly in what is now Alabama and Mississippi, had been one of the first to sign a treaty of friendship with the newly independent American colonies; in the War of 1812, they had fought bravely alongside Gen. Andrew Jackson against the British at New Orleans. In 1831, General Jackson – by then president – had repaid his debt by making the Choctaws the first Indian nation to be forced west along the Trail of Tears. Thousands died along the way."

Get the Story:
Adam Goodheart: The Choctaw Confederates (The New York Times 2/9)

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