The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory ed. by Bradley R. Clampitt (review)

The eight chronological essays that make up this anthology contribute to the growing trend of examining the Civil War beyond the familiar paradigm of the North versus the South. This formulation, as Bradley Clampitt notes in his introduction, does not explain the “violent conflict in Indian Territory, a region populated predominantly by people who were neither Northern nor Southern and indeed were not U.S. citizens” (1). Rather, he posits that the “series of ‘wars within a war’” in Indian Territory are best seen within a framework of sovereignty (2). At issue for Native populations in this interpretation was the continued survival of their nations as independent and sovereign units. Clampitt’s introduction presents a general overview of the concerns that pushed Natives in Indian Territory into the American Civil War, mostly on the side of the Confederacy.

No matter which side Native populations chose, the effects of military action in Indian Territory were terrible. Richard B. McCaslin offers an overview of the battles that took place in the region, placing Indian Territory firmly within the larger Confederacy. Famously, Opothleyahola and his fellow Union supporters, many of whom were women and children, were chased into Kansas by Confederate Indians. The Confederates killed and captured many of Opothleyahola’s followers. At the same time, Federal forces killed Indian prisoners allegedly attempting to escape and left the bodies of Indian dead unburied on the battlefield, unlike the bodies of white Confederates. Of course, as the story of Opothleyahola demonstrates, civilians also suffered during the war. Clarissa Confer’s essay includes whites and African Americans in an exploration of the civilian experience of the Civil War in Indian Territory. As with the larger South, this population suffered dislocation and deprivation. Compounding the situation, however, was the reality that soldiers from both sides lived in the region, unlike in most southern states.

Brad Agnew’s discussion of the Five Nations (Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole) begins with the decades between Removal and the Civil War. Described as a “golden era” by former Cherokee Nation chief Wilma Mankiller, Agnew argues instead that old divisions regarding Removal remained and were exacerbated by the creation of common schools and the native adoption of Christian religion (64). Moreover, land-hungry whites and railroad speculators continued to pressure the Natives for territory. Thus the American Civil War did not mark an end to an era of prosperity; instead, “the 1840s and 1850s were decades of constant threat to Indian sovereignty and unresolved differences within several nations” (67). Once the war arrived in Indian Territory, the results were catastrophic. Agnew asserts that although the battles there were less significant to the outcome of the Civil War than those fought elsewhere, Indian Territory was the “bloodiest theater of the Civil War” (70). Adding to the weight of the tremendous loss of life in Indian Territory during this era is F. Todd Smith’s essay focusing on the peoples living in the far western section of Indian Territory under the authority of the Wichita Agency. Smith finds that despite having avoided much of the fighting, nearly one-third of these Natives perished between their departure to Kansas in 1862 and their return to the agency in 1867. These groups faced threats both from Texans and from other Native populations, including the Kiowas and Comanches.

Once the war ended, the Natives in Indian Territory faced a renegotiation of their relationship to the federal government, a process of reconstruction similar to that experienced in the American South. Christopher B. Bean finds that the “negro question” in Indian Territory centered not on the issue of slavery or emancipation, but on the question of citizenship: what would be the place of these freedpeople in Indian nations (115)? Linda W. Reese’s essay turns to the population in question: the freedpeople. She argues that enslaved people in Indian Territory fought two civil wars: a military war followed by...