 On October 28, 1861, the Cherokee Nation formally issued their Declaration of Causes, the full title being Declaration by the People of the Cherokee Nation of the Causes which have impelled them to unite their fortunes with those of the Confederate States of America. The Declaration begins with a relatively honest assessment of the Cherokee situation at the time. It begins by detailing the southern roots of the Cherokee, explaining that the Cherokee Nation shares common interests with the Confederate States. Among these is the fact that the Cherokee people did legally recognize the institution of slavery and many Cherokee and other Native Americans own slaves. But as we will see, this was not the prevailing reason why the tribes allied with the Confederacy. The Declaration also mentions that following their treaties with the United States, they upheld their end of the agreement and acted as friends toward the U.S. government. Though it did not say it in the Declaration, the Cherokee Nation was surrendering claims to sizable debts owed to them by the U.S. government according to the previous treaties. But in late October, it was not clear if the United States was going to follow through with their obligations anyway. This, as we will see, was a much more significant factor in the Cherokee decision. They also acknowledged that the Cherokee people were greatly outnumbered and this put them in a vulnerable position to be overrun by either side. But neutrality was simply not an option for them. This is another point that carried a lot of weight with the tribe's decision and it also gives us more insight into the diplomacy of the Confederacy and the Union which is part of the reason why these episodes follow so naturally from the previous two episodes on British diplomacy. In many ways, the Indian nations were similar to border states. This is an oversimplification so don't put too much weight into that statement but the parallels are important. As many of Americans did own slaves, this was not the predominant reason for their joining the Confederacy. It was a factor, to be sure, but it was not the primary factor. Ford Sumter and Lincoln's call for troops didn't matter as much to the Cherokee as it did to the border states though either. But this does not mean that the Cherokee people were unaware of or unconcerned by the Union actions. In one part of the declaration, they state, quote, In the Northern states, the Cherokee people saw with alarm a violated constitution all civil liberty put in peril and all the rules of civilized warfare and the dictates of common humanity and decency unhesitatingly disregarded. In states which still adhered to the Union, a military despotism has displaced the civil power and the laws became silent amid arms. Free speech and almost free thought became a crime. The right to the writ of habeas corpus guaranteed by the Constitution disappeared at the nod of a secretary of state or a general of the lowest grade. The mandate of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was set at naught by the military power and this outrage on common right approved by a president sworn to support the Constitution. War on the largest scale was waged and the immense bodies of troops called into the field in the absence of any law warranting it under the pretense of suppressing unlawful combination of men. The humanities of war, which even barbarians respect were no longer thought worthy to be observed. Foreign mercenaries in the scum of cities and the inmates of prisons were enlisted and organized into regiments and brigades and sent into southern states to aid in subjugating a people struggling for freedom to burn, to plunder, and to commit the basest of outrages on women while the hills of an armed tyranny trot upon the necks of Maryland and Missouri and men of the highest character and position were incarcerated upon suspicion and without process of law and jails and forts and in prison ships and even women were imprisoned by the arbitrary order of a president and cabinet ministers. While the press ceased to be free the publication of newspapers was suspended and their issues seized and destroyed. The officers and men taken prisoner in battle were allowed to remain in captivity by the refusal of their government to consent to an exchange of prisoners as they had left their dead on more than one field of battle that had witnessed their defeat to be buried and their wounded to be cared for by southern hands. End quote. If you're a regular listener to this podcast you are familiar with these stories that the Cherokee Nation's Declaration of Cause is list. Some of it, no doubt, is the product of misinformation the rumors and hyperbole that spread quickly in conditions of war. But much of it was accurate. The suspension of habeas corpus was controversial even in unquestionably loyal union states. The press had been suppressed with editors imprisoned and property seized or destroyed. Some of what they cite as union crimes I have not talked about. The accusation that the union army was taking prisoners and refusing prisoner exchanges is most likely a reference to a standoff between Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis that was just starting to take place as the declaration was being signed. Only days before the declaration was signed the captured crew of a Confederate privateership were charged as pirates which means they would be treated as criminals to be executed rather than prisoners of war to be exchanged. I did briefly mention some of this controversy in the previous two episodes but not in any great detail though I will be telling that story in just a couple of episodes when I talk about the union blockade. The line accusing the union of leaving their dead and injured troops behind to be cared for by southerners was also true but somewhat disingenuous. The union army did this because they lost the battles and therefore the territory being contested. So this is all to say that the Cherokee Nation's list of grievances against the union vary in their accuracy but it still gives us a glimpse into the Cherokee Nation's view of the union's wartime actions. In the declaration they also claim that these reasons held for the other four of the so-called civilized tribes. The creeks are Muscogee, the Seminoles, the Choctaws and the Chickasaws in addition to the Cherokee themselves. The end of the declaration of causes falsely claims that the decision to ally with the Confederacy was unanimously agreed upon. If you read the declaration without any other historical context it seems simple enough but as we will find out today just as is the case with any other significant historical event the reality was far more complicated. I'm Chris Calton and this is the Mises Institute for the most historical controversies. In the previous episode we took a big step back in the chronology so that I could provide some long background on the five civilized nations. The process by which Americans came to see them as civilized which is to say anglicized and then the process of Indian removal. We will pick up the story there with a focus today on the Cherokee Nation specifically as it was the largest of the five nations and the last to join the Confederacy and this story will bring us back into the early months of the Civil War. We will also see that the decision for the Cherokee Nation to ally with the Confederacy was not as simple as their declaration makes it seem or as simple as the isolated pieces of trivia most people get about the Cherokee in the Civil War if they know about this at all. We left off in the previous episode with the removal of the Indians from their ancestral lands in the southeastern region of the United States to west of the Mississippi River. This was done by offering treaties between the Indian nations or even factions within those nations and the treaties were superficially voluntary but in reality the tribal chiefs who agreed to sign them only did so because they knew if they didn't they would be forced off their land anyway. The controversy over these treaties divided the nations between the pragmatists who believed that if they signed the treaty there was at least the possibility that the US government would uphold its end to the bargain and the Indians who refused to give up the land of their ancestors for the pragmatists of course they weren't naive enough to have any real faith in the US government after all they already had previous treaties that guaranteed them the land they were now being removed from so this really was a case of low probability compared to no chance at all. Also, and this is where the pragmatists who signed the treaties most immediately were vindicated if they did not resist they would be able to take the time to gather their belongings and supplies that would help them survive the trip and settle when it was completed. When the holdouts were finally forced off their land the removal process would claim many lives as they would be forced out of their homes with little more than the shirts on their backs. Even those who were lucky enough to survive the forced migration faced the hardship of settling unclear to lands with no supplies as the US government had promised to provide them supplies to help them settle but unsurprisingly failed to keep that promise. Although this was all done in the 1830s the tribal divisions it would create and the hostility toward the US government it would foster would play a role in the decisions the civilized nations would make in the civil war. In both the case of the factional divisions and the hardship of removal the Cherokee experience is the most famous. Just as with the other Indian nations the Cherokee nation had treaties in place that guaranteed the security of their territories from encroachment by white settlers and just like the other nations as the population of the United States grew more US citizens started moving into their territories. In 1829 when gold was discovered and part of the Cherokee land in Georgia the move into their territory rapidly increased. Only the year before this the state of Georgia which had been urging the forced removal of the Cherokee from Georgia for most of the decade already passed a series of laws that redefined much of the Cherokee territory in Georgia as being part of various counties. This basically meant that the state of Georgia was defining the territorial boundaries of the federal treaty. The law basically rejected the sovereignty of the Cherokee nation in these territories so they couldn't pass and enforce their own laws. The case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia went to the Supreme Court where Chief Justice John Marshall issued an opinion that the court did not have jurisdiction to come to a decision but it did stipulate that the Cherokee nation was a domestic dependent nation rather than a sovereign foreign power. So here we had an interesting dilemma that can be somewhat confusing if you only have the bullet point details. Georgia wanted the Cherokee out of their state but the Cherokee Nation had a treaty with the U.S. federal government guaranteeing their sovereignty in stipulated territories. The state of Georgia passed a laws that essentially assumed legal jurisdiction over the Cherokee territory in Georgia and then they passed a laws that protected the Cherokee nation from unlicensed white settlement on these lands. This last point on the surface might look like the state of Georgia was actually upholding the terms of the treaty. The problem, of course, was that the state of Georgia claimed the authority to decide who could and could not legally live in Cherokee territory rather than this being decided by the Cherokee's own government. So a missionary, Samuel Warchester, who was actually a defender of Cherokee sovereignty was convicted of illegally living in Cherokee territory and sentenced to hard labor but he was working with Cherokee leaders and even helped set up their first Native American newspaper. So it's easy to look at this and think that the state of Georgia was actually trying to honor the Cherokee agreement with the United States but the overarching issue of territorial boundaries was being combated on the grounds of legal jurisdiction and Cherokee sovereignty. Warchester took his case to the Supreme Court which ruled in Warchester's favor and in the case of Warchester v. Georgia John Marshall actually issued an opinion that overturned his own previous opinion in the case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. This time he ruled that the Cherokee Nation was a sovereign foreign power and therefore any laws passed in relation to it were the exclusive jurisdiction of the National Congress. Thus the law that required licenses to permit settlement on Cherokee land was overturned. Andrew Jackson who was president at the time of this ruling was not pleased with it as he was a champion of Indian removal and the Indian Removal Act of 1830. In a private letter he complained that the Supreme Court could not quote coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate end quote. This is actually the source of the well-known fake quote by Andrew Jackson where he supposedly said Marshall has made his decision now let him enforce it. Although he never actually said this famous line it does seem to be implied in his private letter commenting on the case. So the victory of Georgia amounted to nothing since the federal government was determined to see the Cherokee removed from the southeastern territory anyway. The Georgia laws that started this series of disputes came the same year that the Scottish Cherokee John Ross became principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. Ross was actually only one eighth Cherokee but he was highly patriotic toward his Cherokee heritage and he led the resistance to removal. He delayed the negotiations with the federal government by demanding $20 million for the lands which he knew was more than the government could pay at this time. It's hard to imagine a time when $20 million wasn't just a minor accounting error for a single bureaucracy of the federal government but in the 1830s we actually had a government that couldn't drop $20 million that easily. So John Ross led the faction of Cherokee resistance but just as with the other nations a faction of pragmatists emerged arguing that it was safer to just move west to avoid being abruptly forced out. This faction, called the Treaty Party, was led by Major Ridge and his son John Ridge, Elias Boudinot, who was the primary person working with Samuel Warchester to start the Cherokee newspaper and fight the Georgia licensing laws, and Boudinot's brother, Stan Wadey. They wanted to reunite with their members who had long before moved to what is now Oklahoma. Because the Treaty Party was more open to agreement the federal government started ignoring John Ross altogether and conducted negotiations with the Treaty Party leaders. They came up with the Treaty of New Achota in 1835 in which the government paid $5 million in exchange for the Cherokee lands in the east as well as covering the cost of migration and resettlement. Over the next two years the Treaty Party members moved west. But John Ross and his followers stood firm. They refused to accept the Treaty of New Achota as legitimate. The people who signed the treaty were self-appointed leaders and they had the lands of the entire Cherokee nation. But the federal government didn't care. They had their treaty and this was enough of a pretext to force the rest of the Cherokee off their land. The forced westward migration was known among the Cherokee as the trail where they cried. Or, more common in modern parlance, the trail of tears. One soldier who was sent to round up the Cherokee holdouts left an account of what he witnessed. I saw helpless Cherokee arrested and dragged from their homes and driven by bayonet into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into 645 wagons and started toward the west. End quote. The army private who left this account, Private John Burnett was more sympathetic toward the Cherokee than some of his comrades in arms who participated in the looting of Cherokee homes. In Little Rock, Arkansas during one stop on the journey, Burnett stayed with John Ross's wife as she died of pneumonia and helped to bury her the next day. Like the other thousands of Cherokee who died during the move, she was hastily buried in a shallow grave. Out of the 18,000 Cherokees who were forced west, as many as 4,000 died along the way. In 1838, when those who survived the trail of tears started to settle on their new land, bitterness over the Treaty of New Achota was running high. The Treaty Party had already settled near the old settlers, as the Cherokee who had moved west years earlier were called. And when the John Ross faction finally showed up, the old settlers welcomed their brethren to the new territory. But John Ross immediately assumed his position as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. This was offensive to the old settlers who actually already had their own independent government and did not believe they were subject to Ross's authority. Additionally, most of the original posts were his followers who blamed the Treaty Party leaders, the Ridges, Boudinot, and Standwaiti, for everything they suffered on the trail of tears. And retribution for selling out their people as the Ross faction saw it, some of Ross's people tried to assassinate the Treaty Party leaders. On June 22nd, 1839, Major Ridge and his son John, along with Elias Boudinot, were assassinated for the crime of violating the Cherokee law against the sale of tribal lands. Nobody knows who the assassins were or if they were working independently or under deliberate instruction, but the targeted victims make it clear that this was a factional dispute. Standwaiti was also targeted, but the attack on his brother came first, giving him a warning. After taking a look at Boudinot's mutilated corpse, Waiti took off and was able to escape assassination, leaving him the sole leader of the Treaty Party faction and the primary political rival to John Ross. With this, the Cherokee nation was more divided than ever before, and over the course of the next few years, at least 34 retaliatory killings took place until the two factions finally reached a peace agreement in 1846. John Ross maintained his position as principal chief, but although this put a stop to the violence, loyalty was still divided between those who sided with Ross and those who sided with Standwaiti, and animosity would simmer over the next decade and a half where it would be given a new outlet in the onset of the Civil War. Over the course of the 1850s, the Indian nations recovered after the difficult resettlement, and although they were somewhat removed from the sectional divisions that were erupting in the decade prior to the Civil War, they weren't all completely unaware of it. The wealthier slave owning Native Americans were more likely to stay apprised of the conflicts, not just because they had a vested interest in slavery themselves, but because upsets in the East could hurt their businesses were part of trade networks with the rest of the country. But just like with the rest of the country, the issue of slavery in the Indian nations was more complicated than we'd like to see it. On the one hand, there were definitely other factors that motivated decisions regarding the sectional conflict in slavery, but slavery was still an important element as well. John Ross was himself a slave owner, but during the 1850s, he was trying to keep the Cherokee Nation neutral in the hostilities. Some other slave Cherokees thought they should immediately align with the southern states whose political leaders were defending the institution, but most of these pro-southern slave holding Cherokee were also part of the treaty party faction that hadn't been a big fan of John Ross for more than a decade now. As anti-slavery sentiment grew in the East, missionaries to the Indian territories also became increasingly anti-slavery. This wasn't universal of course, there were religious defenses of slavery offered to the religious defenses of abolition, and it wasn't uncommon for missionaries in the Indian territory to hire rental slaves to work for them while they were there, but in the 1850s the presence of anti-slavery missionaries increased. The southern Baptist convention decided in 1855 to respond to this by sending pro-slavery missionaries to the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Muscogee nations. This increased the tension in the Indian territories as the anti-slavery and pro-slavery Christian missionaries were bringing with them the sectional hostilities of the states. An abolitionist missionary in the Cherokee nation, Evan Jones, worked predominantly with John Ross and his followers. Even though Ross himself owned slaves, most of his followers moved from a position of neutrality on slavery to opposition to both the institution and the pro-southern Cherokees. Most of Ross's followers were full-blooded Cherokee and weren't fond of having leadership positions granted to mixed blood Cherokees. So John Ross is now finding himself in an uncomfortable position as the formal leader of the Cherokee nation, where he is a slave owner of mixed ancestry whose supporters are predominantly full-blooded anti-slavery Cherokees. Evan Jones and the full-blooded started the Ketuwa Society which was focused on preserving traditional Cherokee society. Additionally, one of the members of the Ketuwa was a Cherokee named Casca New, a name I'm probably butchering, who controlled the Cherokee light horse. The light horsemen were kind of like the vigilance committees of California. They were formed to protect people and property, predominantly from horse raids by the so-called wild Indians who stole horses and cattle from the civilized nations. So this was essentially a private police force and it was headed by a Ketuwa. But along with the missionaries, another group found their way into the Cherokee territory, the Knights of the Golden Circle. As regular listeners will know from previous episodes, the Knights of the Golden Circle were pro-slavery Southern expansionists who, after Lincoln's election, would energetically agitate for secession. In the Cherokee nation, they found allies among the pro-Southern slave-holding Cherokee who largely supported Stand Waiti. And many of these Waiti supporters joined the Knights specifically for the purpose of countering the power of Casca New and his light horsemen. With this new outlet for the long-standing factional division of the Cherokee people, the Ketuwa started to more openly embrace the pro-Northern anti-slavery position. Ketuwa society members started to wear cross-shaped pins under the lapels of their coats so they could easily identify each other. They began to be referred to as the Pin Indians. They outnumbered the Cherokees in the Knights of the Golden Circle and by the 1860s, they dominated both houses of the Cherokee legislature. Even though they were generally hostile to slavery and mixed blood of political leaders, they supported John Ross because of his position on neutrality towards the sectional crisis. But this is essentially how the sectional problems in the rest of the United States reawakened the divisions in the Cherokee nation, which had always been simmering below the surface anyway and set the stage for inter-tribal violence even before the Civil War. It also shows that shortly before the war itself, the people in positions of power in the Cherokee nation desired neutrality, but were clearly leaning in favor of the North. Adding fuel to the fire in the increasingly tense Cherokee nation was Kansas. Part of the territory that was granted to the Cherokee people in the Treaty of New Achota overlapped with the southeastern corner of Kansas, which meant it also shared a border with Missouri. This means that the Kansas-Missouri border war was taking place in areas in which white settlers were not supposed to legally be able to move in the first place, though as with Georgia, this legal guarantee amounted to very little. This meant that Cherokee territories were subject to raids by both pro-Slavery Bushwhackers and the anti-Slavery Jayhawkers, and this meant that the pro and anti-Slavery factions of Cherokee grew further divided. With 1860 election, Cherokee leaders had bigger concerns than the slavery question, though. Even though the Treaty of New Achota guaranteed them their new lands permanently, they were not naive enough to believe that a change in administration could not have been a reneg on agreements made by previous administrations. There were already federal officials who were writing official reports about the plentiful resources in the Indian lands and advocating that the federal government step in not to confiscate the land, but to divide it up between individual Indian citizens, which would be the basis for later Indian treaties in which the government allotted a specific acreage of Indian territory to individual families, but in a way that the United States claimed as its own, so it was a roundabout means of seizing desirable Indian land. This would not take place until after the war, but the idea was already floating around prior to the election of 1860, and Cherokee leaders were reasonably concerned about it. But the issue of Native American land was not really a matter of stark party differences. The proponents of these earlier ideas to take the western Indian lands were predominantly pro-slavery Southerners, but the Republican party wasn't exactly much different on the matter. During the election, William Seward gave a speech in Chicago that was blunter than most about the desire for the Indian territories. He said, quote, the Indian territory south of Kansas must be vacated by the Indians, end quote. Apparently motivated by this speech, squatters in the Cherokee Kansas territory started to more openly direct their violence against the Cherokee there, but it also meant that once Lincoln was elected and Seward was named Secretary of State, the Cherokee leaders had plenty of reason not to trust the Lincoln administration. Even as most of the Cherokees in power tended to favor the North in the sectional dispute. After all, the same Cherokees who tended to be more pro-Northern and anti-slavery were also generally the same who made up the anti-removal faction in the 1830s, and therefore actually suffered through the Trail of Tears an experience they did not want to repeat. This clearly was a far bigger issue for the Cherokee people than slavery. When the war finally erupted in April the five nations were paying close attention to the goings on in the east knowing that the outcome of the conflict would undoubtedly affect them greatly. Both the Confederacy and the Union had reason to recruit the Indians as their allies. They had livestock that translated into food, leather, and horses that both militaries would need in great supply. Parts of the Indian territories had supplies of lead that would be in high demand for ammunition, as well as salt to preserve meat. But the Indians were also capable in battle. Because the civilized nations had to fend off raids from other Indian tribes, they already had organized and experienced combat units. Factions of Seminoles had held out against attempts at removal until as late as 1859, and their fighting there had led to stories about the legendary fighting abilities of the Native Americans. In Arkansas, estimates of the combat capable Indians in the west were as high as 25,000. So if one side gained the Indian nation their allies, it could very well be the difference in the war, especially when you consider this in the context of the summer of 1861 when nobody was able to conceive how long and how expansive the war would actually prove to be. As soon as the war began, people from government envoys to Christian missionaries were trying to secure the loyalty of the Indians for one side or the other. But the Indian nations themselves weren't sure the best course to take. At the beginning of 1861, on January 5th, the Chickasaw Government proposed a union of the five nations in order to protect their shared interests. But the differences between the five nations seemed to have outweighed their shared interests, particularly in regards to slavery. The Choctaw and Muskogee Nation actually passed harsh black codes in their territories that stipulated that the free blacks living there, often former slaves who had purchased their freedom from their Indian owners, had to get rid of everything they owned and claim a master by March 10th, 1861. If any free black person failed to do this, they would be arrested and sold into slavery. So the law basically stipulated that blacks in these territories could either pick their new owner or an owner would be imposed on them. But there would be no such thing as free black citizens and the Choctaw or Muskogee Nation. Even the most extreme southern states never passed a policy this harsh. Most of the Indian territory shared closer proximity to southern states and the Indians there had more roots in southern culture since this is where they came from prior to moving west. With this and the slavery issue, there was a lot of reason to side with the Confederacy. However counteracting this were the treaties with the Union government that entitled the nations to annual funds which the United States had been honoring. Joining the Confederacy meant releasing the United States from that obligation and if the Confederacy lost the war they'd probably end up losing a great deal more than this money. But between the two sides, the Confederacy was willing to make themselves attractive to the five nations than the Union. When the war started troops were called out from the various forts in the west that served to protect the five nations from other tribes of Indians who raided their settlements and stole their livestock. The decision to move the troops from these forts was reasonable from the perspective of the Union. These forts were in Confederate territories and they were not well defended enough to hold off the secessionists who immediately took to seizing federal properties. The Union was trying to mobilize troops to protect Washington D.C. and they needed every man they could get. But the Indian nations the removal of troops from the forts left them vulnerable and was seen as a violation of their treaties regardless of the extenuating circumstances. If the treaties were violated in this way there was no reason to believe that it could not extend to the failure to pay the yearly entitlements as well. So the reasons to stay with the Union were falling apart pretty quickly. With Confederates from Arkansas and Texas making their way to Indian territory, the decision to join the Confederacy was also seen as a matter of self-preservation. The Indian nations certainly did not have the strength and numbers to defend against the Confederacy so neutrality was a bigger risk than siding with the South. The Chickasaws were the first to declare independence from the United States doing so on May 25th. They cited the withdrawal of federal troops from the forts as their justification for doing so. The Choctaw Nation followed suit on June 10th. Their justification echoed the sentiments of the Declaration of Independence but in 1865 one of the pro-union political leaders of the time said that the decision was really motivated by the inability to defend themselves against Confederates if they were attacked. Essentially then the Choctaw Nation was motivated by the same forces as the Chickasaws. The Muscogee were not much different except that when they separated from the U.S. they also cited the lack of any statement from Washington about the policy toward the Indian nations and their annuities for 1860 they had not yet been paid with the justification that they were worried the annuities would be taken by the Confederacy. This was the only major factor that kept Indian interests attached to the union. However many Muscogee leaders including many who owned slaves believed that neutrality would be the best policy rather than an alliance with the Confederacy. But the Confederacy sent two officers, Albert Pike who has recently appointed the Confederate Commissioner to the Indian Territory Nations and Brigadier General Ben McCulloch to negotiate an alliance. You may remember McCulloch and Pike from the episodes on the operations to control Missouri as they played a role there in assisting the secessionists. But here McCulloch seemed like an odd pick to send to deal with the Indians as he had previously been a key figure in defeating the Comanches in Texas. Although the five nations would not see themselves as being the same people as the Comanches McCulloch, like many people at the time saw Indians as all basically one group of people. In his famous diary Mary Chestnut even commented on a visit from McCulloch saying quote, how he hated the Indians. But regardless the pair were successful in negotiating new Confederate treaties with the Indians. The new treaties promised Confederate annexation of the Indian Territories guaranteed protection of slavery, the construction of military posts, roads, railroads, telegraph lines and a postal service. They agreed to take over the payments of annuities promised by the US government and they also promised to allow the Indians to have congressional representation in the Confederate national government. In exchange the Indian nations would raise and equip troops for the Confederate army. These treaties were drafted for all five nations even though not all of them were immediately ready to sign them. After the Chickasaws, Choctaws and Muscogee joined the Confederacy the Seminole nation came next. I mentioned in the last episode that the Seminole were an offshoot of the Muscogee but they tended to be more anti-slavery of the five nations. Many of them now spoke against a Confederate alliance but other Seminoles were compelled by the same motivations that led the other three nations to join the Confederacy. The result here was factionalism in which one group of Seminoles joined the Confederates and the other decided to try and uphold the treaty with the United States while maintaining neutrality in the war. But with four nations now secured for the Confederacy, not counting the faction of Seminoles that made up a pretty small percentage of the total population of the five nations, the Cherokee Nation, the largest of the five, was the only one still taking a position of neutrality. The factions from the 1830s were still the basis for division in 1861 with John Ross advocating neutrality and Stan Weidy leading the push for a Confederate alliance. By June, the Weidy faction seemed determined to ally with the Confederacy with or without the John Ross faction. Pike and McCulloch met with John Ross in July and tried to convince him to join them. Ross still refused to abandon neutrality and because the government was dominated by the Kituwa who generally held more opposition to the South and slavery, the Weidy faction was not powerful enough to speak for the Cherokee Nation the way it did when it signed the Treaty of New Achota in 1835. Still, Weidy accepted an officer's commission in the Confederate army and agreed to lead 300 Cherokee volunteers for the Confederate military, something that brought the Cherokee factions to the brink of violence. With factional violence looming within his tribe, John Ross wanted to make sure that tribal unity took priority over everything else. This meant that at this point he was likely willing to ally with any side if it meant keeping the tribe unified. Kind of how with the outset of the war Abraham Lincoln said that he was willing to enslavery, guarantee slavery, or ended in some places while keeping it in others as long as the given policy kept the union from dissolving, John Ross would have been happy to ally with the Confederacy, the Union, or maintain neutrality for the unity of his nation. But just as Abraham Lincoln found out there was no position that would satisfy all sides. But as July moved into August, the Cherokee Nation learned about the terrible union defeats at Bull Run in Wilson's Creek. This changed the question of who to ally with, if anybody. After these two significant defeats, the Confederacy looked to be winning a war that everybody had been certain would be very quick. If you are confident about who is going to win the war, it is in your self-interest to side with the apparent victor in order to stay in their good graces after the war is over. This was the logic that John Ross was toying with by mid-August. Apparently he wasn't alone in this line of thinking as Standwaiti was gaining even more volunteers for Cherokee Confederates. This meant that rather than a Cherokee victory putting a neutral Cherokee Nation in bad standing with the victorious government, a Confederate victory that was aided by the Standwaiti faction of Cherokees might mean Confederate help in deposing John Ross as principal chief. To be perfectly clear, we don't know exactly what was going through John Ross's head at this moment, but these are factors that historians have pointed to and attempts to explain John Ross's decision based on incentive structures, since we don't exactly have records of his private thoughts. But whether his intentions were motivated by a patriotic concern for his nation, a selfish concern for his political position, a combination of two or something different entirely, John Ross called a public council meeting on August 20 and gave a speech that apparently was ambiguous enough that half the attendees thought they were going to join the Confederacy while the other half thought he was planning to maintain neutrality. But Ross's aim was indeed to ally with the Confederacy. The next day on August 21, the council met again and Ross gave another speech calling for the Cherokee people to unite around their government. Unity was, at least in this speech, John Ross's greatest concern. He appealed to his Kituwa supporters who valued Cherokee traditions on the grounds that Tribal Unity was one of the core traditional values of the Cherokee people. Even with this meeting, many of the Ross factions still seemed uncertain about what Ross was calling for, which was a Confederate alliance. The stand, weighty factions seemed less confused, but even though Ross was giving into their policy preferences, some of them were upset that this would help protect Ross from being replaced by weighty. Two of weighty's followers sent him a letter about Ross's meeting, complaining that the public council quote, in reality tied up our hands and shut our mouths and put the destiny and everything connected with the nation and the hands of the executive. The pins, the Kituwa, already have more power than we can bear, end quote. So tribal politics were still very much a concern, and at least in the eyes of Ross's opposition, Ross had simply convinced the legislature to put more power into the hands of the executive. But on August 21st, 1861, the same day that Ross gave his second speech calling for unity, the Cherokee nation issued its declaration of causes that I opened the episode with. With this, the Cherokee nation became the last of the five civilized tribes to join the Confederacy, but the decision was not an easy one and it was not without controversy. For the civilized nations, we are probably best viewing them as similar to the states, like Tennessee or Virginia or Missouri, where loyalty was divided in the actions of the official government was not enough to convince many citizens to fall in line. And the fact that even with all five nations officially joining the Confederacy, there were still many Indians who were loyal to the Union, so that the early battles fought in the Indian territory were waged between pro-Union Indians and pro-Confederate Indians. This short campaign is known as the Trail of Blood on Ice and it will be the topic of the next episode. 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