Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South by Barbara Krauthamer (review)

The issue of race has played a major role in recent interdisciplinary scholarship about the history of Native Americans’ internal affairs. Instead of viewing Native societies as “beyond race,” studies have examined how Native peoples responded to “racial categorization and stratification” in their own communities and governance.¹ At the core of Krauthamer’s current study of the Choctaw and Chickasaw’s African slaves is a reconstruction of our understanding not only of Native-American and African-American history but also a re-definition of the boundaries between groups in the South and the political struggle for freedom and citizenship that faced Native peoples and their freedmen.

Krauthamer contributes an important addition to this ongoing discussion, revising previously held understandings of slavery in Indian country as “benign and inherently different from bondage in the United States.” Indian territory is not simply “the West” but “a site of slavery, emancipation, and struggles for meaningful freedom and citizenship” (153). As a historical site of study, it is far closer to the South than previous studies have allowed. Krauthamer’s study utilizes a wide variety of sources that weave together social, political, legal, racial, and indigenous history in important ways. She juxtaposes Kiziah Love, a freedwoman who told her oral history to the wpa project, with the fables and popular memories about slave history and then tells the story of freedpeople in the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations who were caught in the “complicated history of Indian sovereignty”(1). The process of acquiring capital and purchasing slaves in the market economy intersected with racial identities. The inclusion of the Choctaw and Chickasaw adoption of enslavement challenges the polarity of Southern history as simply black and white after Indian removal.

Krauthamer’s transition to chattel slavery is missing the anthropological work of Robbie Ethridge’s From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540–1715 (Chapel Hill, 2010), which traces the coalescence of the Chickasaw nation through the practice of militarized slaving societies. Krauthamer highlights the Pitchlynn family in the Choctaw nation’s acquisition of slaves as the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations developed and embraced racial ideologies that disenfranchised African Americans by linking race with legal status during the 1840s. These actions culminated with the October 1840 expulsion of all free black people by the Choctaw General Council (71).

Slaves with Baptist backgrounds purchased from Georgia highlight the source material available from missionary records of the African-American slaves in Choctaw and Chickasaw territories. Krauthamer argues that the missionaries created the training ground for the slaves’ political autonomy, opening “opportunities that might temporarily curb the reach of their masters’ control” (59). Krauthamer artfully positions Indian country in the narrative of slaves’ resistance and opposition to masters’ control over their bodies and resources. From the murder of Richard Harkins, slave codes, and, finally, factions in constitutional drafting, Krauthamer ties Choctaw Chickasaw slaveholders’ to the sectional crisis. As a broad historical narrative, Krauthamer is most successful in discussing freedmen’s political organization in the post-emancipation era. When concerns about land, suffrage, and emancipation led to the involvement of the federal government, African-American freedmen, although culturally tied and bonded to the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations, began to contemplate ways in which to grasp their freedom and act as political agents in their own right, looking to “the future and possibilities not yet realized” (126).