Trail Sisters: Freedwomen in Indian Territory, 1850–1890

5. Building Communities

Chapter Five Building Communities “The good Lord knows I’m glad slavery is over. Now I can stay peaceful in one place.” Nancy Rogers Bean, in Baker and Baker, The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives Immediately after the Civil War, the most important concerns for the freedwomen, regardless of their location, centered on the essential needs of survival: food, shelter, and clothing for themselves and their children in the midst of postwar scarcity. Next came the desire to reestablish family ties and kinship networks. Finally, they sought to find sustainable work and to build homes and communities. By the last decades of the century they were to realize, however, that the ongoing clash of interest groups, government policies, and immigration into Indian Territory caused momentous changes to their lives, some nearly as significant as emancipation had. These forces would completely redefine their relationships, their freedom of action, and their identity. The Reconstruction treaties signed with the Five Nations in 1866 precipitated the conditions that opened Indian Territory to examination by the larger population and institutions of the United States. Indian Territory and its natural resources were “discovered” by business interests caught up in the accelerating industrialization process forging the growth of the United States. Religious and educational organizations now considered all the Building Communities •115• people of Indian Territory fertile ground for mission work. Baptist, Presbyterian , and Methodist denominations were predominant in this field. Black leaders and freedmen from the South, disappointed in the violent environment and limited freedoms of Jim Crow racial policy, looked west to the possibilities of a new and less rigid frontier. Freedwomen watched the world they had known slip quickly away, to be replaced with a world of larger opportunities and greater dangers. In this process new relationships and connections with immigrant freedwomen were consummated. Christian missionaries had been active in Indian Territory since the time of the removal of the Five Nations from their southeastern homelands . Some of the missionary families made the overland journey with the Indian peoples and experienced the hardships of rebuilding homes and mission stations in a raw, undeveloped area. Indian, black, and white people worshipped together in these early times. For example, Ebenezer Church, the first black Baptist church in Indian Territory, was organized in 1832 by Rev. and Mrs. David Lewis, white missionaries to the Creeks. Charter members included three black slaves and one Creek Indian. By 1836 the church had grown substantially. Rev. David Rollin wrote an account of the church’s work that year for the Baptist Missionary Magazine. He reported that services had been held every Sunday except one, and he had instituted a temperance pledge, which all members had signed. Church membership, including himself, his wife, and one female assistant , totaled eighty-two: six whites, twenty-two Indians, and fifty-four blacks. By 1842 black pastors known only as Jack and Jacob held a revival and baptized 100 Indian, black, and white congregants. The question of Christianizing the enslaved people of the Indians grew more contentious in the 1850s, and with the onset of the Civil War many of the missionaries were forced to flee their churches for safer ground elsewhere in the United States.1 Peace brought renewed interest in Indian Territory for religious propagation not only among the Indian peoples but among their emancipated slaves as well. Now missionaries had no restraints placed upon their efforts by overly cautious slaveholders. By 1870 there were three black Baptist churches in the Cherokee Nation, and in 1872 two churches from the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations formed an association in Atoka. All of these churches were integrated, but as time passed, a racial divide Trail Sisters •116• became more apparent and pronounced. The North Fork Church proved typical of the process. The congregation, ministered by Harry Islands, a former Cherokee slave, saw their racial composition slowly change. One observer wrote that the church continued to prosper as a black church, “but the Indians shied off from it, since the Blacks were in the majority, and now free.” The original Baptist leaders fought against segregation as long as possible, hoping to retain one body of faith in Indian Territory, but by 1891 the Baptist Missionary and Educational Convention set formal division in motion. Their message, addressed to “Our African Brethren ,” recommended that they “organize themselves into a territorial convention ” since the older states had “deemed [it] wisest and best” for the black churches...