 The story of Pocahontas is certainly among the most famous American legends. It's no mystery that the Disney movies laughably inaccurate. Nobody really expected otherwise. But she is probably the most famous Native American in American history, and has been since she was still alive. When several states passed one-drop laws, stipulating that Jim Crow laws applied to any person with one drop of non-white blood, Virginia modified theirs to allow somebody to be as much as one-sixteenth Native American and still be considered part of the white population. This is known as the Pocahontas exception, and it was passed specifically because prominent white Virginia families like to claim that they were descendants of Pocahontas and her husband John Rolfe, who was one of the first settlers to the new colony and introduced the strain of tobacco that jump-started the early colonial economy. So Pocahontas really is a legendary figure in the most literal sense of the word. She is a legend. She is famous, but most people have no idea what she's famous for. She exists today more as a fiction character than a historical one. But what she's famous for is interesting in light of today's episode. The only portrait of Pocahontas ever produced is one that was crafted specifically for the British public to promote colonization. In it, she is wearing high-class British attire, and the inscription refers to her as Rebecca. The artist deliberately avoided lightening her skin. The idea was to show the British public that the promise of civilizing and christianizing the Indians of the new world was being kept. In reality, her marriage had more to do with diplomacy than anything else. John Rolfe wanted to marry Pocahontas ever since John Smith had brought her back to Jamestown as a young girl, maybe 12 or 13 at the time. You can actually find online a transcript of John Rolfe's letter asking permission to marry her, promising to christianize her. That's kind of creepy, honestly. But Pocahontas was a daughter of Powhatan, the chief of the Powhatan Indians. The marriage to John Rolfe, at least it seems most likely, was a peace offering, not unlike aristocratic marriages and feudal times. John Rolfe's marriage to Pocahontas ended the warfare between the Jamestown colonists and the Powhatan Indians, at least until Powhatan died, and his brother, Opecan Canal, took over. Rolfe, it seems, really did just want a wife. His first wife having died on the journey to the Virginia colony. But to the rest of Britain, Pocahontas was a trophy. She reluctantly adopted the name Rebecca. She was brought to London and treated as a guest of honor, Lady Rebecca. And she was paraded as a king's daughter in front of all the members of the London aristocracy. People saw in her a savage who was glad to finally be civilized and christianized by the benevolent British colonists. So John Smith's account of visiting her in London after not having seen her for years suggests she was there out of obligation to her own people rather than because she wanted to be. But this is why Pocahontas originally became famous. During the heyday of colonization, people romanticized the practice on the grounds of spreading civilization and religion, and Pocahontas was their vindication. She was born a savage of the New World, but she had successfully transformed into a respectable English citizen, Lady Rebecca. She had become civilized. This idea of civilizing the Indians would not die after America's independence. As the British colonies and later the United States continued to expand, they came into contact with more and more tribes of Native Americans. Sometimes this resulted in bloody conflicts, but the ideal solution, both before and after the Civil War, was assimilation. Indians should be civilized by adopting European and American values and customs. After the Bauhatan tribe, this attitude found its representation in five other Native American tribes, the Cherokee, the Muscogee, known by the British as the creeks, the Chickasaws, the Choctaws, and the Seminoles. By the 1820s and 30s, they would be known as the five civilized tribes, who in 1861 would be faced with the decision of staying neutral or choosing a side in the Civil War. And to understand their decision, we need to look at the long history of their becoming, in the eyes of Americans, civilized. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. We just finished the story of the tense diplomatic situation between the Union and Britain at the outset of the war that culminated in the fiasco known as the Trent Affair. And at one point looked like it might also result in a war in Britain's Canada territory. The next few episodes can probably fit somewhat into the theme of Confederate Union diplomacy, if we want them to, though I don't intend to talk much about diplomacy throughout the war, since it didn't amount to much of interest. These episodes also present part of the history of Native Americans in the Civil War, but that theme can be misleading as well. We will eventually talk about the infamous Dakota War that took place in 1862 and led to the largest mass execution in United States history. But combining the history of the civilized tribes, for example, with the history of the Sioux, which was the name given to the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota tribes by their enemies, can be misleading as the Sioux were rather imperialistic against other Native American tribes, not unlike Manifest Destiny in the United States. Their stories are connected more by how we collectively categorize the many Native American tribes, similar to how we refer to people in Germany, Portugal, and the Ukraine collectively as Europeans. Most people already know this, of course, but I pointed out because it's something that we should be conscientious of when thinking about this history. So the history of the Five Nations really is quite separate from other elements of the history of Indians during the Civil War. Probably most accurately, we can consider the history of the Five Nations at the outset of the war as part of the Western border war that chiefly centers on the Kansas-Missouri border. If you remember the six episodes I devoted to the Union operations to control Missouri, we will see similar characters. And later, when we deal more with guerrilla warfare between the Missouri Bushwhackers and Kansas Jayhawkers, the Five Nations have a role as well. But it's hard to place this history in a broader narrative of the Civil War, which I think is part of the reason it doesn't get much attention. It's easier to just leave them out of the story altogether if you're crafting a single volume narrative and they don't connect well to most narrower histories of some significant event. Ultimately, many historians will also argue that the role of the Native Americans amounted to little significance in the outcome of the war, and that's probably true. But the story is interesting enough to be worth telling, and it certainly fits into some of the themes we've been finding in the early part of the war, tribal divisions not unlike Western Virginia and Eastern Tennessee, negligence by the Lincoln administration, and the effects of the Union's appearance of losing the war by the end of 1861. But we need to start with some pre-war background on the Five Nations, and this means covering a lot of ground very rapidly over the course of this in the next episode. The history of why these five Indian nations were called the Civilized Tribes is useful in understanding what made their relationship with the US and Confederate government unique from other tribes, and it goes all the way back to the late 17th century. At that time, the Cherokee boasted a population of about 30,000, making it the largest of the five tribes. They lived predominantly on what are now the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia, Kentucky, and Alabama, so they were pretty spread out. The Cherokee were Iroquoian, and the other four civilized tribes were the Muscogean, a distinction recognized by language, not tribal affiliation. The Muscogee tribe itself, later called the Creeks by the British, consisted of about 15,000 people. They were mostly in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, making them neighbors to the Cherokee. The Seminoles were an offshoot of the Muscogee, also living in Florida, and were the smallest of the five tribes, separating from the Muscogee, mostly due to geographical barriers as they moved farther south in Florida. The Choctaws lived in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama, and their tribe was divided into three districts. The Chickasaws were the most decentralized of the tribes, related by culture more than anything else, and their numbers were smaller than any but the Seminoles. All five tribes were sedentary. They lived in wooden houses with thatched roofs. The men hunted and fished while the women farmed, made clothing, and raised children. Most of us pretty much know the bullet points for the history of the European arrival, starting in the early 16th century with the Spanish. Conflicts increased leading to warfare. The Spanish were far more oppressive to the natives they encountered than the French or British colonists were overall, despite whatever faults we may find with the French and British at the time. Less sinister but more destructive, of course, were the European diseases that were unwittingly introduced to a people who had no immunity, decimating the Indian populations. But the civilization process, as the Europeans saw it, started with trade, particularly between the Indians and the British. The Native Americans sold the Europeans animal skins and slaves in exchange for firearms, guns, cookware, and all kinds of other manufactured goods that they had never seen before. With the introduction of trade, the culture of the tribes evolved. For example, they started engaging in commercial hunting in pursuit of items that they could trade the Europeans in exchange for the valuable goods that they didn't have the capital infrastructure or requisite knowledge to produce themselves. They also took slaves from raids and warfare with other tribes in order to sell them to the colonists. Probably the more important step in the civilizing process from the European perspective was raising children of mixed ancestry. Sometimes this was a result of affairs between Europeans and their female liaisons, but often, European men married Native American women. Essentially, the cultures were assimilating. According to tribal culture, citizenship came from the mother, so children of European fathers were accepted as equal members of the tribe. As the generations progressed, this meant a wider population of bilingual Indians since the children were raised speaking both English and their native languages. The Anglo-Indian children grew up and pioneered many of the changes in the tribes that reflected European traditions. Some of them even became tribal leaders. Like the Europeans, these tribes started keeping domesticated livestock rather than farming crops and hunting animals. The cultural views on land ownership might have been the most tremendous change as some of them started setting up farms or other ventures on large plots of land that were excluded from the previous mentality of community ownership. The five tribes had practiced forms of slavery since long before the arrival of the Europeans, but they did take up the Euro-American system of chattel slavery to work the land. Chattels, if I haven't explained this in the past, were a specific type of slave that we think of when we think of American slavery in which slaves were enslaved for life and their children were also enslaved for life. So not all forms of slavery throughout global history have been chattel slavery. The Seminoles were unique in this respect. And African slavery was at least part of the basis for their breakaway from the Muscogee people. By 1832, the Muscogee tribe had a population of about 22,000 members and nearly 1,000 slaves. The Seminoles actually sheltered fugitive slaves who fled south from the Muscogee. Kind of like Canada, they refused to recognize the ownership rights of the people who tried to claim fugitive slaves and former slaves set up their own farms under the protection of the tribe. Eventually, some of them became recognized as tribal members because of valuable skills they had, such as the ability to speak both English and Muscogee, allowing them to act as interpreters. The establishment of the reservation system by the US government in the early 19th century also played a role in the civilizing of the tribes. The federal government wanted to educate the Indian children living on the reservations, which it believed would help the Indians assimilate into Anglo-American culture. So the government set up the Indian Civilization Fund in 1819. The government partnered with Christian missionaries to help educate the Native Americans, which meant the spread of both English literacy and Christianity. Missionaries, initially from the Society of the United Brethren for the Southern States, taught all Indian children reading, writing, and arithmetic, and they taught agricultural skills to the boys and home-making skills to the girls. Keep in mind this idea that Indian men would be responsible for agriculture was a significant cultural change from the traditional past in which women grew crops and men hunted and fished. In 1825, the first Native American school, the Choctaw Academy, was founded, and over the next five years, several more followed for all tribes except the Seminals. Individual Indians met these changes in different ways. Many of the Anglo-Indians led the way in these reforms. Others accepted the usefulness of many European innovations, but wanted to retain as many of their traditions as they could. And some were resistant to the changes altogether, calling for the rejection of European and American goods and practices, or they advocated tribal alliances against the Americans. These recommendations were not heated, but many Native Americans were still not thrilled about the reforms, but saw them as a means of self-preservation as the European presence grew around them. In various treaties, they handed land over to the federal government only to have more settlers crowd their borders. The history of US Indian relations, especially after the war, would demonstrate time and again that regardless of any treaty, the United States would side with its own citizens in any kind of land dispute. There were some Muskogee who tried to resist the American encroachment, but with disastrous consequences. One group of Muskogee, known as the Red Sticks, led an attack on Fort Mims in Alabama in 1813. Southern Americans were outraged. General Andrew Jackson led the Tennessee Militia South to put down the Red Sticks, and Jackson was joined by members of the Cherokee Choctaw and Chickasaw during the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in March of 1814, where he crushed the Red Sticks. Nearly 1,000 Red Sticks were killed, and the surviving Red Sticks fled South to join the Seminoles. Andrew Jackson rewarded his Native American allies by forcing them to side the Treaty of Fort Jackson. He didn't see tribal distinction, and he blamed all of the Southern tribes for the Red Sticks actions. In the treaty, he compelled them to hand over 20 million acres of land. To the Indians who lived through this, the Creek War, as it was called, greatly affected the way they saw the United States government and their own tribal sovereignty. One such Indian was John Ross, a half-Scottish Cherokee who helped Andrew Jackson suppress the Red Sticks before seeing how Jackson treated even the so-called loyal Indians. In 1828, John Ross would become the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, a title he would hold until his death in 1866. He will obviously be playing a leading role in the story of the Cherokee Nation during the Civil War in the next episode. Anglo-Indians like John Ross still celebrated the progress of their tribes in adopting aspects of European culture, but they began to reaffirm their determination for tribal sovereignty, self-governance, and independence from the United States. While independence and self-governance were cherished, many tribal leaders began to advocate reforms for their own tribal government modeled after the United States. Here is another element of their becoming civilized in the eyes of Americans. In the 1820s, the Choctaws adopted a written code of laws and established a police force. In 1826, they wrote their own constitution and passed a bill of rights. They established a judicial system with districts and circuit courts. Even though they maintained a principal chief as their executive authority, they established a bicameral legislature. By 1827, their government looked distinctly American. Other tribes made reforms as well, not as fully American as the Choctaws, but with the exception of the Seminoles, all tribes adopted Anglican reforms. By the 1830s, Americans who visited Indian territory in the South would not seem out of place. The towns and the people all looked very similar to the rest of the South. You might see a woman wearing moccasins, but even though they sewed their own dresses, they copied American styles. The towns had churches and general stores, and the large farms had African slaves. To many observers, they were more American than Indian in their way of life. This was when they started to be referred to as the five civilized tribes. The culture among the tribes was probably more divided than American observers realized, but it's hard to tell exactly because written records are going to more commonly be left by the most Anglicized people. Historian Amy Sturgis categorizes the civilized tribes according to three cultural persuasions in the 1830s. Those who were ready and willing to assimilate into American culture, particularly common among the Anglo-Indians. Those who wanted to adopt American customs that were of value, such as Christianity or agricultural practices, but still wanted to remain a separate and sovereign people, and those who wanted to remain separate people and retain their traditional way of life prior to European and American influence. This last category, predominantly being both older and full-blooded Native Americans. These inter-tribal differences would cause important divisions that would continue to play out during the Civil War. In the 1820s, the federal government was putting pressure on the civilized tribes to move west of the Mississippi to make room on their land for American settlers. Missouri and Arkansas were already well populated, so this meant predominantly Kansas and Oklahoma. The federal government offered treaties that drove a wedge between different factions within each tribe. Some people refused any idea of abandoning their ancestral land, but others were more pragmatic. It wasn't that they believed they were getting a good deal, they just recognized that they couldn't win a war against the United States government. By signing the treaty, they might actually get something in exchange for their land, whereas if they resisted, they were likely to get forced off of it with no compensation at all. Both federal and state officials made promises and offered money to tribes to convince tribal leaders to sign the treaties. Because the large tribes were divided into small affiliated tribes, each with its own chief, some chiefs took the deals offered them. The Muscogee National Council responded to this by imposing a law that called for the death penalty for any chief who did this without Muscogee consent. In a way, this is kind of the same thing as the federal government imposing its sovereignty on states and cities, and it caused ruptures within the Muscogee nation. The title of chief could refer to a position similar to what we call mayor, governor, or a president, depending on their level of chiefdom. In 1824, the principal chief of one of the Muscogee districts, so think of him kind of like a state governor here, William McIntosh, went against the Muscogee National Council and signed the Treaty of Indian Springs, handing over the land they held in Georgia and Alabama in exchange for land west of the Mississippi. The Muscogee National Council appointed a former red stick named Minawah to carry out his execution, and with a band of more than 100 men, Minawah surrounded McIntosh's home, ordered the evacuation of the women and children, and set fire to it while McIntosh was still inside. When he tried to escape, McIntosh was shot. Civil War loomed for the Muscogee tribe following this incident. The McIntosh factions took off for the Arkansas River Valley, settling near an Oklahoma city named after them, Muscogee, Oklahoma. The rest of the tribe held out where they were, but American settlers continued to crowd them out. In 1830, President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law, this being a policy that had been discussed by the federal government since the Jefferson administration. Two years later, in vindication of McIntosh's pragmatism, the Muscogee Nation signed the Treaty of Washington, handing over the remainder of their ancestral lands, and the treaty required their evacuation within five years. Before those five years were up, harassment by some of the American settlers provoked what is known as the Creek Rebellion, which was suppressed by General Winfield Scott in 1836. The response was a prelude to the Trail of Tears. One survivor, Sally Farnie, left an oral history of the experience, quote, the command for a removal came unexpectedly upon most of us. There was the time that we noticed that several overloaded wagons were passing our home, yet we did not grasp the meaning. However, it was not long until we found the reason. Wagons stopped at our homes, and the men in charge commanded us to gather what few belongings could be crowded into the wagon. We were to be taken away and leave our homes never to return. This was just the beginning of much weeping and heartaches. We were taken to a crudely built stockade and joined others of our tribe. We were kept pinned up until everything was ready before we started on the march. Even here, there was the awful silence that showed the heartache and sorrow of being taken from the homes and even separation from loved ones. Most of us had not foreseen such a move in this fashion or at this time. We were not prepared, but times became even more horrible after the real journey began. Many fell by the wayside. Too faint with hunger or weak to keep up with the rest. The aged, feeble, and sick were left to perish by the wayside. A crude bed was quickly prepared for these sick and weary people. Only a bowl of water was left within reach. Thus they were left to suffer and die alone. The little children cried day after day from weariness, hunger, and illness. Many of the men, women, and even the children were forced to walk. The sick and the birds required attention, yet there was no time or no one was prepared. Death stalked at all hours, but there was no time for proper bearing or ceremonies. My grandfather died on this trip. A hastily cut piece of cotton wood contained his body. There were several men carrying reeds with eagle feathers attached to the end. These men continually circled around the wagon trains or during the night around the camps. Their purpose was to encourage the Indians not to be heavy-hearted, nor to think of the homes that had been left. Some of the older women sang songs that meant, we are going to our home and land. There is one who is above and ever watches over us. He will care for us. Many a family was forced to abandon their few possessions and necessities. When their horses died, or were too weary to pull the heavy wagons any further. End quote. Another survivor remembered the experience of an elderly woman who was forced onto a boat bound for the Indian territory. Quote, when the events with never know more to live in the East had taken place, she too remembered that she had left her home and with shattered happiness, she carried a small bundle of her few belongings and reopening and re-tying her pitiful bundle. She began a sad song, which was later taken up by the others on board the ship at the time of the wreck. And the words of her song was, I have no more land. I'm driven away from home, driven up the red waters. Let us all go. Let us all die together and somewhere upon the banks we will be there. End quote. The treaty that was forced upon them promised the Muskogee people supplies, food, clothing, tools. When they arrived in the Indian territory, the federal government had failed to deliver. Without food or shelter, nearly all of the infants and young children that survived the trip perished anyway. The total Muskogee population was cut nearly in half and had undoubtedly would have been more had it not been for the Macintosh faction that left years earlier for seeing this exact tragedy, taking with them their own supplies rather than relying on the United States government to keep its word. Eventually the two factions reconciled their differences. The other civilized tribes were forced to make similar moves. The Choctaw signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, recognizing that the United States government would not be their ally against Mississippi. The treaty at least offered the guarantee that quote, no territory or state shall ever have a right to pass laws for the government of the Choctaw nation of the red people and their descendants. And no part of the land granted them shall ever be embraced in any territory or state. End quote. Whether or not the federal government would respect that guarantee remained to be seen. But it was preferable to holding out until they were forced out anyway. Like the Macintosh faction of the Muskogee tribe, they were being realistic. But the people weren't all in agreement with the decisions made by the tribal leaders. One Choctaw historian, whose father experienced the removal first hand, wrote quote, no greater humiliation can be placed upon a free people than to be ordered from their homes by a stranger. No greater forbearance can any people show than to give up these homes to be desecrated and destroyed by a stranger. Yet this is just what happened. And all because their head chiefs had asked them to do this. Can you believe it? End quote. Another survivor gave an account of her family's experience of being forced into government wagons, quote, the roads were almost impassable. It was raining and cold. Even for the well and strong, the journey was almost beyond human endurance. Many were weak and broken hearted. And as night came, there were new graves dug beside the way, end quote. Roughly 2000 Choctaw died from this move. The Chickasaws held out until 1837 and after their leader met with President Andrew Jackson in Tennessee. At the meeting, the president ominously warned the Chickasaw chief that if he didn't move his people west, the federal government would not be able to control the aggressive Southerners who would move onto their lands. The implied threat was clear. They could leave now under the pretense of a voluntary agreement or they could hold their ground and be moved by force. The Chickasaws, at least, had less ground to cover during their move and they were able to gather most of their belongings, including slaves and horses to make the trip. It was still difficult, but it was nothing compared to what the Choctaw and Muskogee tribes had suffered. The Seminoles like the Muskogee saw a few of their chiefs agree quickly to the 1832 Treaty of Payne's Landing, which only stipulated that they should visit the Muskogee lands that had been settled by the Macintosh faction. If they liked what they saw, they would move their people there and reunite with the Muskogee. But even the idea of considering the move upset many tribal members. One of the tribal leaders, a young Seminole named Asiola, killed a signer of the treaty and would become a leader of the anti-removal faction, serving as war chief during the Second Seminole War that would last from 1835 until 1842. Oh, he would die in captivity before the war ended. The Seminoles would move to the Indian territory west of the Mississippi, but they would do so in small groups over the course of several years. Some Seminoles would hold out until as late as 1859. But the most infamous of the Indian removals is that of the Cherokee, which I've deliberately left out. Their removal, known as the Trail of Tears, would establish tribal conflicts that would survive into the Civil War. We will pick up the next episode with the Trail of Tears and see how it culminates in the Cherokee's decision, along with the four other civilized tribes, to ally with the Confederacy in 1861. Historical controversies is a production of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. If you would like to support the show, please subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher and leave a positive review. You can also support the show financially by donating at Mises.org slash SupportHC. If you would like to explore the rest of our content, please visit Mises.org. That's M-I-S-E-S dot O-R-G.