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The Slaveholding Indians

  (1) As Slaveholder and Secessionist
  (2) As Participants in the Civil War
  (3) Under Reconstruction

Vol. I

[Illustration: INDIAN TERRITORY, 1861 [_From General Land Office_]]

  The American Indian as
  Slaveholder and Secessionist

  AN OMITTED CHAPTER IN
  THE DIPLOMATIC HISTORY OF THE
  SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY

  BY ANNIE HELOISE ABEL, PH.D.

  THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY
  CLEVELAND: 1915

  COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
  ANNIE HELOISE ABEL

TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER

CONTENTS

      PREFACE                                                         13

    I GENERAL SITUATION IN THE INDIAN COUNTRY, 1830-1860              17

   II INDIAN TERRITORY IN ITS RELATIONS WITH TEXAS AND ARKANSAS       63

  III THE CONFEDERACY IN NEGOTIATION WITH THE INDIAN TRIBES          127

   IV THE INDIAN NATIONS IN ALLIANCE WITH THE CONFEDERACY            207

      APPENDIX A--FORT SMITH PAPERS                                  285

      APPENDIX B--THE LEEPER OR WICHITA AGENCY PAPERS                329

      SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY                                          359

      INDEX                                                          369

ILLUSTRATIONS

  INDIAN TERRITORY, 1861                                  _Frontispiece_

  MAP SHOWING FREE NEGRO SETTLEMENTS IN THE CREEK COUNTRY             25

  PORTRAIT OF COLONEL DOWNING, CHEROKEE                               65

  PORTRAIT OF JOHN ROSS, PRINCIPAL CHIEF OF THE CHEROKEES            112

  PORTRAIT OF COLONEL ADAIR, CHEROKEE                                221

  MAP SHOWING THE RETREAT OF THE LOYAL INDIANS                       263

  FORT MCCULLOCH                                                     281

PREFACE

This volume is the first of a series of three dealing with the
slaveholding Indians as secessionists, as participants in the Civil War,
and as victims under reconstruction. The series deals with a phase of
American Civil War history which has heretofore been almost entirely
neglected or, where dealt with, either misunderstood or misinterpreted.
Perhaps the third and last volume will to many people be the most
interesting because it will show, in great detail, the enormous price that
the unfortunate Indian had to pay for having allowed himself to become a
secessionist and a soldier. Yet the suggestiveness of this first volume is
considerably larger than would appear at first glance. It has been
purposely given a sub-title, in order that the peculiar position of the
Indian, in 1861, may be brought out in strong relief. He was enough inside
the American Union to have something to say about secession and enough
outside of it to be approached diplomatically. It is well to note, indeed,
that Albert Pike negotiated the several Indian treaties that bound the
Indian nations in an alliance with the seceded states, under the authority
of the Confederate State Department, which was a decided advance upon
United States practice--an innovation, in fact, that marked the tremendous
importance that the Confederate government attached to the Indian
friendship. It was something that stood out in marked contrast to the
indifference manifested at the moment by the authorities at Washington;
for, while they were neglecting the Indian even to an extent that
amounted to actual dishonor, the Confederacy was offering him political
integrity and political equality and was establishing over his country,
not simply an empty wardship, but a bona fide protectorate.

Granting then that the negotiations of 1861 with the Indian nations
constitute a phase of southern diplomatic history, it may be well to
consider to what Indian participation in the Civil War amounted. It was a
circumstance that was interesting rather than significant; and the
majority will have to admit that it was a circumstance that could not
possibly have materially affected the ultimate situation. It was the
Indian country, rather than the Indian owner, that the Confederacy wanted
to be sure of possessing; for Indian Territory occupied a position of
strategic importance, from both the economic and the military point of
view. The possession of it was absolutely necessary for the political and
the institutional consolidation of the South. Texas might well think of
going her own way and of forming an independent republic once again, when
between her and Arkansas lay the immense reservations of the great tribes.
They were slaveholding tribes, too, yet were supposed by the United States
government to have no interest whatsoever in a sectional conflict that
involved the very existence of the "peculiar institution." Thus the
federal government left them to themselves at the critical moment and left
them, moreover, at the mercy of the South, and then was indignant that
they betrayed a sectional affiliation.

The author deems it of no slight advantage, in undertaking a work of this
sort, that she is of British birth and antecedents and that her
educational training, so largely American as it is, has been gained
without respect to a particular locality. She belongs to no section of
the Union, has lived, for longer or shorter periods in all sections, and
has developed no local bias. It is her sincere wish that no charge of
prejudice can, in ever so small a degree, be substantiated by the
evidence, presented here or elsewhere.

  ANNIE HELOISE ABEL.
    Baltimore, September, 1914

I. THE GENERAL SITUATION IN THE INDIAN COUNTRY, 1830-1860

Veterans of the Confederate service who saw action along the
Missouri-Arkansas frontier have frequently complained, in recent years,
that military operations in and around Virginia during the War between the
States receive historically so much attention that, as a consequence, the
steady, stubborn fighting west of the Mississippi River is either totally
ignored or, at best, cast into dim obscurity. There is much of truth in
the criticism but it applies in fullest measure only when the Indians are
taken into account; for no accredited history of the American Civil War
that has yet appeared has adequately recognized certain rather interesting
facts connected with that period of frontier development; viz., that
Indians fought on both sides in the great sectional struggle, that they
were moved to fight, not by instincts of savagery, but by identically the
same motives and impulses as the white men, and that, in the final
outcome, they suffered even more terribly than did the whites. Moreover,
the Indians fought as solicited allies, some as nations, diplomatically
approached. Treaties were made with them as with foreign powers and not in
the farcical, fraudulent way that had been customary in times past. They
promised alliance and were given in return political position--a fair
exchange. The southern white man, embarrassed, conceded much, far more
than he really believed in, more than he ever could or would have
conceded, had he not himself been so fearfully hard pressed. His own
predicament, the exigencies of the moment, made him give to the Indian a
justice, the like of which neither one of them had dared even to dream. It
was quite otherwise with the northern white man, however; for he,
self-confident and self-reliant, negotiated with the Indian in the
traditional way, took base advantage of the straits in which he found him,
asked him to help him fight his battles, and, in the selfsame moment,
plotted to dispossess him of his lands, the very lands that had, less than
five and twenty years before, been pledged as an Indian possession "as
long as the grass should grow and the waters run."

From what has just been said, it can be easily inferred that two distinct
groups of Indians will have to be dealt with, a northern and a southern;
but, for the present, it will be best to take them all together.
Collectively, they occupied a vast extent of country in the so-called
great American desert. Their situation was peculiar. Their participation
in the war, in some capacity, was absolutely inevitable; but, preparatory
to any right understanding of the reasons, geographical, institutional,
political, financial, and military, that made it so, a rapid survey of
conditions ante-dating the war must be considered.

It will be remembered that for some time prior to 1860 the policy[1] of
the United States government had been to relieve the eastern states of
their Indian inhabitants and that this it had done, since the first years
of Andrew Jackson's presidency, by a more or less compulsory removal to
the country lying immediately west of Arkansas and Missouri. As a result,
the situation there created was as follows: In the territory comprehended
in the present state of Kansas, alongside of indigenous tribes, like the
Kansa and the Osage,[2] had been placed various tribes or portions of
tribes from the old Northwest[3]--the Shawnees and Munsees from Ohio,[4]
the Delawares, Kickapoos, Potawatomies, and Miamies from Indiana, the
Ottawas and Chippewas from Michigan, the Wyandots from Ohio and Michigan,
the Weas, Peorias, Kaskaskias, and Piankashaws from Illinois, and a few
New York Indians from Wisconsin. To the southward of all of those northern
tribal immigrants and chiefly beyond the later Kansas boundary, or in the
present state of Oklahoma, had been similarly placed the great[5] tribes
from the South[6]--the Creeks from Georgia and Alabama, the Cherokees
from Tennessee and Georgia, the Seminoles from Florida, and the Choctaws
and Chickasaws from Alabama and Mississippi.[7] The population of the
whole country thus colonized and, in a sense, reduced to the reservation
system, amounted approximately to seventy-four thousand souls, less than
seven thousand of whom were north of the Missouri-Compromise line. The
others were all south of it and, therefore, within a possible slave belt.

This circumstance is not without significance; for it is the colonized, or
reservation, Indians[8] exclusively that are to figure in these pages and,
since this story is a chapter in the struggle between the North and the
South, the proportion of southerners to northerners among the Indian
immigrants must, in the very nature of things, have weight. The relative
location of northern and southern tribes seems to have been determined
with a very careful regard to the restrictions of the Missouri Compromise
and the interdicted line of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes was
pretty nearly the boundary between them.[9] That it was so by accident may
or may not be subject for conjecture. Fortunately for the disinterested
motives of politicians but most unfortunately for the defenceless Indians,
the Cherokee land obtruded itself just a little above the thirty-seventh
parallel and formed a "Cherokee Strip" eagerly coveted by Kansans in later
days. One objection, be it remembered, that had been offered to the
original plan of removal was that, unless the slaveholding southern
Indians were moved directly westward along parallel lines of latitude,
northern rights under the Missouri Compromise would be encroached upon.
Yet slavery was not conscientiously excluded from Kansas in the days
antecedent to its organization as a territory. Within the Indian country,
and it was all Indian country then, slavery was allowed, at least on
sufferance, both north and south of the interdicted line. It was even
encouraged by many white men who made their homes or their living there,
by interlopers, licensed traders, and missionaries;[10] but it flourished
as a legitimate institution only among the great tribes planted south of
the line. With them it had been a familiar institution long before the
time of their exile. In their native haunts they had had negro slaves as
had had the whites and removal had made no difference to them in that
particular. Since the beginning of the century refuge to fugitives and
confusion of ownership had been occasions for frequent quarrel between
them and the citizens of the Southern States. Later, when questions came
up touching the status of slavery on strictly federal soil, the Indian
country and the District of Columbia often found themselves listed
together.[11] Moreover, after 1850, it became a matter of serious import
whether or no the Fugitive Slave Law was operative within the Indian
country; and, when influenced apparently by Jefferson Davis,
Attorney-general Cushing gave as his opinion that it was, new
controversies arose. Slaves belonging to the Indians were often enticed
away by the abolitionists[12] and still more often were seized by southern
men under pretense of their being fugitives.[13] In cases of the latter
sort, the Indian owners had little or no redress in the federal courts of
law.[14]

In point of fact, during all the years between the various dates of Indian
removal and the breaking out of the Civil War, the Indian country was
constantly beset by difficulties. Some of the difficulties were
incident to removal or to disturbances within the tribes but most of them
were incident to changes and to political complications in the white man's
country. Scarcely had the removal project been fairly launched and the
first Indian emigrants started upon their journey westward than events
were in train for the overthrow of the whole scheme.

[Illustration: MAP SHOWING FREE NEGRO SETTLEMENTS IN THE CREEK COUNTRY
[_From Office of Indian Affairs_]]

When Calhoun mapped out the Indian country in his elaborate report of
1825, the selection of the trans-Missouri region might well have been
regarded as judicious. Had the plan of general removal been adopted then,
before sectional interests had wholly vitiated it, the United States
government might have gained and, in a measure, would have richly deserved
the credit of doing at least one thing for the protection and preservation
of the aborigines from motives, not self-interested, but purely
humanitarian. The moment was opportune. The territory of the United States
was then limited by the confines of the Louisiana Purchase and its
settlements by the great American desert. Traders only had penetrated to
any considerable extent to the base of the Rockies; but experience already
gained might have taught that their presence was portentous and
significant of the need of haste; that is, if Calhoun's selection were to
continue judicious; for traders, as has been amply proved in both British
and American history, have ever been but the advance agents of settlers.

Unfortunately for the cause of pure philanthropy, the United States
government was exceedingly slow in adopting the plan of Indian removal;
but its citizens were by no means equally slow in developing the spirit of
territorial expansion. Their successful seizure of West Florida had fired
their ambition and their cupidity. With Texas annexed and lower Oregon
occupied, the selection of the trans-Missouri region had ceased to be
judicious. How could the Indians expect to be secure in a country that was
the natural highway to a magnificent country beyond, invitingly open to
settlement! But this very pertinent and patent fact the officials at
Washington singularly failed to realize and they went on calmly assuring
the Indians that they should never be disturbed again, that the federal
government would protect them in their rights and against all enemies,
that no white man should be allowed to intrude upon them, that they should
hold their lands undiminished forever, and that no state or territorial
lines should ever again circumscribe them. Such promises were decidedly
fatuous, dead letters long before the ink that recorded them had had time
to dry. The Mexican War followed the annexation of Texas and its conquests
necessitated a further use of the Indian highway. Soldiers that fought in
that war saw the Indian land and straightway coveted it. Forty-niners saw
it and coveted it also. Prospectors and adventurers of all sorts laid
plans for exploiting it. It entered as a determining factor into Benton's
great scheme for building a national road that should connect the Atlantic
and Pacific shores and with the inception of that came a very sudden and a
very real danger; for the same great scheme precipitated, although in an
indirect sort of way, the agitation for the opening up of Kansas and
Nebraska to white settlement, which, of course, meant that the recent
Indian colonists, in spite of all the solemn governmental guaranties that
had been given to them, would have to be ousted, for would not the
"sovereign" people of America demand it? Then, too, the Dred Scott
decision, the result of a dishonorable political collusion as it was,[15]
militated indirectly against Indian interests. It is true that it was only
in its extra-legal aspect that it did this but it did it none the less;
for, if the authority of the federal government was not supreme in the
territories and not supreme in any part of the country not yet organized
into states, then the Indian landed property rights in the West that
rested exclusively upon federal grant, under the Removal Act of 1830, were
virtually nil. It is rather interesting to observe, in this connection,
how inconsistent human nature is when political expediency is the thing at
stake; for it happened that the same people and the same party,
identically, that, in the second and third decades of the nineteenth
century, had tried to convince the Indians, and against their better
judgment too, that the red man would be forever unmolested in the western
country because the federal government owned it absolutely and could give
a title in perpetuity, argued, in the fourth and fifth decades, that the
states were the sole proprietors, that they were, in fact, the joint
owners of everything heretofore considered as national. Inferentially,
therefore, Indians, like negroes, had no rights that white men were bound
to respect.

The crucial point has now been reached in this discussion. From the date
of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the sectional affiliation of the Indian
country became a thing of more than passing moment. Whatever may have been
John C. Calhoun's ulterior and real motive in urging that the
trans-Missouri region be closed to white settlement forever, whether he
did, as some of his abolitionist enemies have charged, plan thus to block
free-state expansion and so frustrate the natural operations of the
Missouri Compromise, certain it is, that southern politicians, after his
time, became the chief advocates of Indian territorial integrity, the ones
that pleaded most often and most noisily that guaranties to Indians be
faithfully respected. They had in mind the northern part of the Indian
country and that alone; but, no doubt, the circumstance was purely
accidental, since at that time, the early fifties, the northern[16] was
the only part likely to be encroached upon.[17] Their interest in the
southern part took an entirely different direction and that also may have
been accidental or occasioned by conditions quite local and present. For
this southern part, by the way, they recommended American citizenship and
the creation of American states[18] in the Union, also a territorial
organization immediately that should look towards that end. Such advice
came as early as 1853, at least, and was more natural than would at first
glance appear; for the southern tribes were huge in population, in land,
and in resources. They were civilized, had governments and laws modelled
upon the American, and more than all else, they were southern in origin,
in characteristics, and in institutions.

The project for organizing[19] the territories of Kansas and Nebraska
caused much excitement, as well it might, among the Indian immigrants,
even though the Wyandots, in 1852, had, in a measure, anticipated it by
initiating a somewhat similar movement in their own restricted
locality.[20] Most of the tribes comprehended to the full the ominous
import of territorial organization; for, obviously, it could not be
undertaken except at a sacrifice of Indian guaranties. At the moment some
of the tribes, notably the Choctaw and Chickasaw,[21] were having domestic
troubles that threatened a neighborhood war and the new fear of the white
man's further aggrandizement threw them into despair. The southern
Indians, generally, were much more exercised and much more alarmed than
were the northern.[22] Being more highly civilized, they were better able
to comprehend the drift of events. Experience had made them unduly
sagacious where their territorial and treaty rights were concerned, and
well they knew that, although the Douglas measure did not in itself
directly affect them or their country, it might easily become the
forerunner of one that would.

The border strife, following upon the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska
Bill, disturbed in no slight degree the Indians on the Kansas
reservations, which, by-the-by, had been very greatly reduced in area by
the Manypenny treaties of 1853-1854. Some of the reserves lay right in the
heart of the contested territory, free-state men intrenching themselves
among the Delawares and pro-slavery men among the Shawnees,[23] the former
north and the latter south of the Kansas River. But even remoteness of
situation constituted no safeguard against encroachment. All along the
Missouri line the squatters took possession. The distant Cherokee Neutral
Lands[24] and the Osage and New York Indian reservations[25] were all
invaded.[26] The Territorial Act had expressly excluded Indian land from
local governmental control; but the Kansas authorities of both parties
utterly ignored, in their administration of affairs, this provision. The
first districting of the territory for election purposes comprehended, for
instance, the Indian lands, yet little criticism has ever been passed
upon that grossly illegal act. Needless to say, the controversy between
slavocracy and freedom obscured and obliterated, in those years, all other
considerations.

As the year 1860 approached, appearances assumed an even more serious
aspect. Kansas settlers and would-be settlers demanded that the Indians,
so recently the only legal occupants of the territory, vacate it
altogether. So soon had the policy of granting them peace and undisturbed
repose on diminished reserves proved futile. The only place for the Indian
to go, were he indeed to be driven out of Kansas, was present Oklahoma;
but his going there would, perforce, mean an invasion of the property
rights of the southern tribes, a matter of great moment to them but
seemingly of no moment whatsoever to the white man. Some of the Kansas
Indians saw in removal southward a temporary refuge--they surely could not
have supposed it would be other than temporary--and were glad to go,
making their arrangements accordingly.[27] Some, however, had to be
cajoled into promising to go and some had to be forced. A few held out
determinedly against all thought of going. Among the especially obstinate
ones were the Osages,[28] natives of the soil. The Buchanan government
failed utterly to convince them of the wisdom of going and was, thereupon,
charged by the free-state Kansans with bad faith, with not being sincere
and sufficiently persistent in its endeavors to treat, its secret purpose
being to keep the free-state line as far north as possible. The breaking
out of the Civil War prevented the immediate removal of any of the tribes
but did not put a stop to negotiations looking towards that end.

All this time there was another influence within the Indian country, north
and south, that boded good or ill as the case might be. This influence
emanated from the religious denominations represented on the various
reserves. Nowhere in the United States, perhaps, was the rivalry among
churches that had divided along sectional lines in the forties and fifties
stronger than within the Indian country. There the churches contended with
each other at close range. The Indian country was free and open to all
faiths, while, in the states, the different churches kept strictly to
their own sections, the southern contingent of each denomination staying
close to the institution it supported. Of course the United States
government, through its civilization fund, was in a position to show very
pointedly its sectional predilections. It will probably never be known,
because so difficult of determination, just how much the churches aided or
retarded the spread of slavery.[29]

Among the tribes of Kansas, denominational strength was distributed as
follows: The Kickapoos[30] and Wyandots[31] were Methodists; but, while
the former were a unit in their adherence to the Methodist Episcopal
Church South, the latter were divided and among them the older church
continued strong. The American Baptist Missionary Union had a school on
the Delaware reservation and, previous to 1855, had had one also on the
Shawnee, which the political uproar in Kansas had obliged to close its
doors. These same Northern Baptists were established also among the
Ottawas, as the Moravians were among the Munsees and the Roman
Catholics[32] among the Osages and the Potawatomies. The Southern Baptists
were likewise to be found among the Potawatomies[33] and the Southern
Methodists among the Shawnees. The Shawnee Manual Labor School, under the
Southern Methodists, was, however, only very grudgingly patronized by the
Indians. Its situation near the Missouri border was partly accountable for
this as it was for the selection of the school as the meeting-place of the
pro-slavery legislature in 1855. The management of the institution was
from time to time severely criticized and the superintendent, the
Reverend Thomas Johnson, an intense pro-slavery agitator,[34] was strongly
suspected of malfeasance,[35] of enriching himself, forsooth, at the
expense of the Indians. The school found a formidable rival, from this and
many another cause, in a Quaker establishment, which likewise existed on
the Shawnee Reserve but independently of either tribal or governmental
aid.

If church influences and church quarrels were discernible among the
northern tribes, they were certainly very much more so among the southern.
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Congregational)
that had labored so zealously for the Cherokees, when they were east of
the Mississippi, extended its interest to them undiminished in the west;
and, in the period just before the Civil War,[36] was the strongest
religious force in their country. There it had no less than four mission
stations[37] and a flourishing school in connection with each. The same
organization was similarly influential among the Choctaws[38] or, in the
light of what eventually happened, it might better be said its
missionaries were. Both Southern and Northern Baptists and Southern
Methodists likewise were to be found among the Cherokees;[39]
Presbyterians[40] and Southern Methodists among the Chickasaws and
Choctaws; and Presbyterians only among the Creeks and Seminoles. In every
Indian nation south, except the Creek and Seminole,[41] the work of
denominational schools was supplemented, or maybe neutralized, by that of
public and neighborhood schools.

True to the traditions and to the practices of the old Puritans and of the
Plymouth church, the missionaries of the American Board,[42] so strongly
installed among the Choctaws and the Cherokees, took an active interest in
passing political affairs, particularly in connection with the slavery
agitation. On that question, they early divided themselves into two camps;
those among the Choctaws, led by the Reverend Cyrus Kingsbury,[43]
supporting slavery; and those among the Cherokees, led by the Reverend S.
A. Worcester,[44] opposing it. The actions of the former led to a
controversy with the American Board and, in 1855, the malcontents, or
pro-slavery sympathizers, expressed a desire to separate themselves and
their charges from its patronage.[45] When, eventually, this separation
did occur, 1859-1860, the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions (Old
School) stepped into the breach.[46]

The rebellious conduct of the Congregational missionaries met with the
undisguised approval of the Choctaw agent, Douglas H. Cooper,[47] formerly
of Mississippi. It was he who had already voiced a nervous apprehension,
as exhibited in the following document,[48] that the Indian country was in
grave danger of being abolitionized:

    If things go on as they are now doing, in 5 years slavery will be
    abolished in the whole of your superintendency.

    (_Private_) I am convinced that something must be done speedily to
    arrest the systematic efforts of the Missionaries to abolitionize the
    Indian Country.

    Otherwise we shall have a great run-away harbor, a sort of
    Canada--with "underground rail-roads" leading to & through
    it--adjoining Arkansas and Texas.

    It is of no use to look to the General Government--its arm is
    paralized by the abolition strength of the North.

    I see no way except secretly to induce the Choctaws & Cherokees &
    Creeks to allow slave-holders to settle among their people & control
    the movement now going on to abolish slavery among them.

        C--

Cooper sent this note, in 1854, as a private memorandum to the southern
superintendent, who at the time was Charles W. Dean. In 1859, it was
possible for him to write to Dean's successor, Elias Rector, in a very
different tone. The missionaries had then taken the stand he himself
advocated and there was reason for congratulation. Under such
circumstances, Cooper wrote,

    I cannot close this report without calling your attention to the
    admirable tone and feeling pervading the reports of superintendents of
    schools and missionaries among the Choctaws, and particularly to that
    of the Rev. Ebenezer Hotchkin, one of the oldest missionaries among
    the Choctaws, who, in referring to past political disturbances, says:
    "We have looked upon our rulers as the 'powers that be, are ordained
    of God,' and have respected them for this reason. 'Whomsoever,
    therefore, resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God'
    (Romans, xiii, 2). This has been our rule of action during the
    political excitement. We believe that the Bible is the best guide for
    us to follow. Our best citizens are those most influenced by Bible
    truth."

    I rejoice to believe the above sentiments are entertained by most, if
    not all, the missionaries now among the Choctaws and Chickasaws, and
    that they entirely repudiate the higher-law doctrine[49] of northern
    and religious fanatics. It is but lately, as I learn, that the Choctaw
    mission, for many years under the control of the American Board of
    Commissioners for Foreign Missions (whose headquarters are at Boston)
    has been cut off, because they preferred to follow the teachings of
    the Bible, as understood by them, rather than obey the dogmas
    contained in Dr. Treat's letter and the edicts of the parent board.

    It is a matter of congratulation among the friends of the old Choctaw
    missionaries, who have labored for thirty years among them, and intend
    to die with armor on, that all connection with the Boston board has
    been dissolved. If it had been done years ago, when their freedom of
    conscience and of missionary action was attempted to be controlled by
    the parent board, much of suspicion, of ill-feeling, and diminished
    usefulness, which attached to the Choctaw missionaries in consequence
    of their connection with and sustenance by a board avowedly and openly
    hostile to southern institutions, would have been prevented.[50]

In the next year, 1860, Cooper was still sanguine as to affairs among the
Indians of his agency and he could report to Rector, unhesitatingly, as
if confident of official endorsement both at Forth Smith and at
Washington,[51]

    Great excitement has prevailed along the Texas border, in consequence
    of the incendiary course pursued in that State by horse thieves and
    religious fanatics; but I am glad to say, as yet, so far as I am
    informed, no necessity has existed in this agency for the organization
    of "vigilance committees" ... No doubt we have among us
    _free-soilers_; perhaps abolitionists in sentiment; but, so far as I
    am informed, persons from the North, residing among the Choctaws and
    Chickasaws, who entertain opinions unfriendly to our system of
    domestic slavery, keep their opinions to themselves and attend to
    their legitimate business.[52]

George Butler, the United States agent for the Cherokees, seems to have
been, no less than Cooper, an adherent of the State Rights Party and an
upholder of the institution of slavery. In 1859, he ascribed the very
great material progress of the Cherokees to the fact that they were
slaveholders.[53] Slavery, in Butler's opinion, had operated as an
incentive to all industrial pursuits. To an extent this may have been
true, since all Indians, no matter how high their type, have an aversion
for work. As Professor Shaler once said, they are the truest aristocrats
the world has ever known. But the slaveholders among the great tribes of
the South were, for the most part, the half-breeds, the cleverest and
often, much as we may regret to have to admit it, the most unscrupulous
men of the community.

Butler's commission as Indian agent expired in March, 1860, and he was not
reappointed, Robert J. Cowart of Georgia[54] being preferred. This man,
illiterate and unprincipled, immediately set to work to perform a task to
which his predecessor had proved unequal. The task was the removal of
white intruders from the Cherokee country. For some time past, the
southern superintendent and the agents under him, to say nothing of
Commissioner Greenwood and Secretary Thompson, the one a citizen of
Arkansas and the other of Mississippi, had resented most bitterly the
invasion of the Cherokee Neutral Lands by Kansas free-soilers and the
division of it into counties by the unlawfully assumed authority of the
Kansas legislature. The resentment was thoroughly justifiable; for the
whole proceeding of the legislature was contrary to the express enactment
of Congress; but no doubt, enthusiasm for the strict enforcement of the
federal law came largely from political predilections, precisely as the
Kansan's outrageous defiance of it came from a deep-rooted distrust of
the Buchanan administration.

There were, however, other intruders that Cowart and Rector and Greenwood
designed to remove and they wanted to remove them on the ground that they
were making mischief within the tribe and interfering with its
institutions, or, more specifically, with slavery. The intruders meant
were principally the missionaries against whom Greenwood had even the
audacity to lay the charge of inciting to murder. Newspapers of bordering
slave states were full of criticism,[55] just before the war, of these
same men and, notably, of the Reverend Evan[56] and John Jones, the
reputed ringleaders. The official excuse for removing them is rather
interesting because it is so similar to that given, some thirty years
earlier, in connection with the removal from Georgia. Ulterior motives can
so easily be hidden under cold official phrase.

That the cause of slavery within the Cherokee country was in jeopardy in
the spring and summer of 1860 can not well be denied. To the men of the
time the evidence was easily obtainable. Almost as if by magic, a "search
organization" started up among the full-bloods, an organization profoundly
secret in its membership and in its purposes, but believed to be for no
other object than the overthrow of the "peculiar institution." Its
existence was promptly reported to the United States government and, as
was to be expected, the missionaries were held responsible for both its
inception and its continuance. It was then that Greenwood made[57] his
most serious charge against these men and prepared, under color of law, to
have them removed. Later, in this same year of 1860, Quantrill, the
Hagerstown, Maryland man of Pennsylvania Dutch origin, who afterwards
became such a notorious frontier guerrilla in the interests of the
Confederate cause, leagued himself with some abolitionists for the sake
of making an expedition to the Cherokee country and rescuing negroes,
there held in bondage.[58] The timely distrust of Quantrill, however,
caused the enterprise to be abandoned even before its preliminaries had
been thoroughly well arranged; yet, had the rescue been carried to
completion, it would not have been entirely without precedent[59] and its
very contrivance indicated an uncertainty and a precariousness of
situation south of the Kansas line.

Ever since their compulsory removal from Georgia under circumstances truly
tragic, the Cherokees had been much given to factional strife. This was
largely in consequence of the underhand means taken by the state and
federal authorities to accomplish removal. The Cherokees had, under the
necessities of the situation, divided themselves into the Ross, or
Anti-removal Party, and the Ridge, or Treaty Party.[60] Removal took place
in spite of the steady opposition of the Rossites and the Cherokees went
west, piloted by the United States army. Once in the west a new division
arose in their ranks; for, as newcomers, they came into jealous contact
with members of their tribe who had emigrated many years previously and
who came to figure, in subsequent Cherokee history, as the Old Settlers'
Party.[61] In 1846, the United States government attempted to assume the
role of mediator in a settlement of Cherokee tribal differences but
without much success.[62] The old wrongs were unredressed, so the old
divisions remained and formed nuclei for new disintegrating issues. Thus,
in 1857, there were no less than three factions created in consequence of
a project for selling the Cherokee Neutral Lands[63]. Each faction had its
own opinion how best to dispose of the proceeds, should a sale take place.
In 1860, there were two factions, the selling and the non-selling[64].
This tendency of the Cherokees perpetually to quarrel among themselves and
to bear long-standing grudges against each other is most important;
inasmuch as that marked peculiarity of internal politics very largely
determined the unique position of the tribe with reference to the Civil
War.

The other great tribes had also occasions for quarrel in these same
critical years. The disgraceful circumstances of their removal had widened
the gulf, once simply geographical, between the Upper and the Lower
Creeks. They were now almost two distinct political entities, in each of
which there were a principal and a second chief. In 1833, provision had
been made for the accommodation of the Seminoles within a certain definite
part of the Creek country[65]--just such an arrangement, forsooth, as
worked so ill when applied to the Choctaws and Chickasaws; but it took
several years for the Seminoles to be suited. At length, when their
numbers had been considerably augmented by the coming of the new
immigrants from Florida, they took up their position, for good and all,
in the southwestern corner of the Creek Reserve, a politically distinct
community. By that time, the Creeks seem to have repented of their
generosity,[66] so, perhaps, it was well that the United States government
had not yielded to their importunity and consented to a like settlement of
the southern Comanches.[67] It had taken the Chickasaws a long time to
reconstruct their government after the political separation from the
Choctaws; but now they had a constitution,[68] all their own, a
legislature, and a governor. The Choctaws had attempted a constitution,
likewise, first the Scullyville, then the Doaksville, set up by a minority
party; but they had retained some semblance of the old order of things in
the persons of their chiefs.[69]

There were other Indians within the southern division of the Indian
country that were to have their part in the Civil War and in events
leading up to it or resulting from it. In the extreme northeastern corner,
were the Quapaws, the Senecas, and the confederated Senecas and Shawnees,
all members, with the Osages and the New York Indians of Kansas, of the
Neosho River Agency which was under the care of Andrew J. Dorn. In the far
western part, at the base of the Wichita Mountains, were the Indians of
the Leased District, Wichitas, Tonkawas,[70] Euchees, and others,
collectively called the "Reserve Indians." Most of them had been brought
from Texas,[71] because of Texan intolerance of their presence, and placed
within the Leased District, a tract of land west of the ninety-eighth
meridian, which, under the treaty of 1855, the United States had rented
from the Choctaws and Chickasaws. It was a part of the old Chickasaw
District of the Choctaw Nation. Outside of the Wichita Reserve and still
wandering at large over the plains were the hostile Kiowas and Comanches,
against whom and the inoffensive Reserve Indians, the Texans nourished a
bitter, undying hatred. They charged them with crimes that were never
committed and with some crimes that white men, disguised as Indians, had
committed. They were also suspected of manufacturing evidence that would
incriminate the red men and of plotting, in regularly-organized meetings,
their overthrow.[72]

Although the plan for colonizing some of the Texas Indians had been
completed in 1855, the Indian Office found it impossible to execute it
until the summer of 1859. This was principally because the War Department
could not be induced to make the necessary military arrangements.[73] In
point of fact, the southern Indian country was, at the time, practically
without a force of United States troops, quite regardless of the promise
that had been made to all the tribes upon the occasion of their removal
that they should _always be protected_ in their new quarters and,
inferentially, by the regular army. Even Fort Gibson had been virtually
abandoned as a military post on the plea that its site was unhealthful;
and all of Superintendent Rector's recommendations that Frozen Rock, on
the south side of the Arkansas a few miles away, be substituted[74] had
been ignored, not so much by the Interior Department, as by the War.
Secretary Thompson thought that enough troops should be at his disposal to
enable him to carry out the United States Indian policy, but Secretary
Floyd demurred. He was rather disposed to dismantle such forts as there
were and to withdraw all troops from the Indian frontier,[75] a course of
action that would leave it exposed, so the dissenting Thompson
prognosticated, to "the most unhappy results."[76]

It happened thus that, when the United States surveyors started in 1858 to
establish the line of the ninety-eighth meridian west longitude and to run
other boundary lines under the treaty of 1855,[77] they found the country
entirely unpatrolled. Troops had been ordered from Texas to protect the
surveyors; but, pending their arrival, Agent Cooper, who had gone out to
witness the determination of the initial point on the line between his
agency and the Leased District, himself took post at Fort Arbuckle and
called upon the Indians for patrol and garrison duty.[78] It would seem
that Secretary Thompson had verbally authorized[79] Cooper to make this
use of the Indians; but they proved in the sequel very inefficient as
garrison troops. On the thirtieth of June, Lieutenant Powell, commanding
Company E, First United States Infantry, arrived at Fort Arbuckle from
Texas and relieved Cooper of his self-imposed task. The day following,
Cooper set out upon a sixteen day scout of the Washita country, taking
with him his Indian volunteers, Chickasaws[80] and a few Cherokees;[81]
and for this act of using Indian after the arrival of white troops, he was
severely criticized by the department. One thing he accomplished: he
selected a site for the prospective Wichita Agency with the recommendation
that it be also made the site[82] of the much-needed military post on the
Leased District. The site had originally been occupied by a Kechie village
and was admirably well adapted for the double purpose Cooper intended. It
lay near the center of the Leased District and near the sources of Cache
and Beaver Creeks. It was also, so reported Cooper, "not very distant from
the Washita, & Canadian" (and commanded) "the Mountain passes through the
Wichita Mountains to the Antelope Hills--to the North branch of Red River
and also the road on the South side of the Wichita Mountains up Red
River."

The colonization of the Wichitas and other Indians took place in the
summer of 1859 under the excitement of new disputes with Texas, largely
growing out of an unwarranted and brutal attack[83] by white men upon
Indians of the Brazos Agency. That event following so closely upon the
heels of Van Dorn's[84] equally brutal attack upon a defenceless Comanche
camp brought matters to a crisis and the government was forced to be
expeditious where it had previously been dilatory. The Comanches had come
in, under a flag of truce, to confer in a friendly way with the Wichitas.
Van Dorn, ignorant of their purpose but supposing it hostile, made a
forced march, surprised them, and mercilessly took summary vengeance for
all the Comanches had been charged with, whether justly or unjustly, for
some time past. After it was all over, the Comanches, with about sixty of
their number slain, accused the Wichitas of having betrayed them.
Frightened, yet innocent, the Wichitas begged that there be no further
delay in their removal, so the order was given and arrangements made.
Unfortunately, by the time everything was ready, the season was pretty far
advanced and the Indians reached their new home to find it too late to put
in crops for that year's harvest. Subsistence rations had, therefore, to
be doled out to them, the occasion affording, as always, a rare
opportunity for graft. Instead of calling for bids, as was customary,
Superintendent Rector entered into a private contract[85] with a friend
and relative of his own, the consequence being that the government was
charged an exorbitant price for the rations. Soon other troubles[86] came.
The Leased District proved to be already occupied by some northern Indian
refugees[87] and became, as time went on, a handy rendezvous for free
negroes; but, as soon as Matthew Leeper[88] of Texas became agent, the
stay of such was extremely short.[89]

Such were the conditions obtaining among the Indians west of Missouri and
Arkansas in the years immediately antedating the American Civil War; and,
from such conditions, it may readily be inferred that the Indians were
anything but satisfied with the treatment that had been and was being
accorded them. They owed no great debt of gratitude to anybody. They were
restless and unhappy among themselves. Their old way of living had been
completely disorganized. They had nothing to go upon, so far as their
relations with the white men were concerned, to make them hopeful of
anything better in the future, rather the reverse. Indeed at the very
opening of the year 1860, a year so full of distress to them because of
the great drouth[90] that ravaged Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, the
worst that had been known in thirty years, there came occasion for a new
distrust. Proposals were made to the Creeks,[91] to the Choctaws,[92] and
to the Chickasaws to allot their lands in severalty, notwithstanding the
fact that one of the inducements offered by President Jackson to get them
originally to remove had been, that they should be permitted to hold their
land, as they had always held it, in common, forever. The Creeks now
replied to the proposals of the Indian Office that they had had experience
with individual reservations in their old eastern homes and had good
reason to be prejudiced against them. The Indians, one and all, met the
proposals with a downright refusal but they did not forget that they had
been made, particularly when there came additional cause for apprehension.

The cause for apprehension came with the presidential campaign of 1860 and
from a passage in Seward's Chicago speech,[93] "The National Idea; Its
Perils and Triumphs," expressive of opinions, false to the national trust
but favorable to expansion in the direction of the Indian territory, most
inopportune, to say the least, and foolish. Seward probably spoke in the
enthusiasm of a heated moment; for the obnoxious sentiment, "The Indian
territory, also, south of Kansas, must be vacated by the Indians," was
very different in its tenor from equally strong expressions in his great
Senate speech[94] on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, February 17, 1854. It soon
proved, however, easy of quotation by the secessionists in their arguments
with the Indians, it being offered by them as incontestable proof that the
designs of the incoming administration were, in the highest degree,
inimical to Indian treaty rights. At the time of its utterance, the
Indians were intensely excited. The poor things had had so many and such
bitter experiences with the bad faith of the white people that it took
very little to arouse their suspicion. They had been told to contract
their domain or to move on so often that they had become quite
super-sensitive on the subject of land cessions and removals. Seward's
speech was but another instance of idle words proving exceedingly fateful.

Two facts thus far omitted from the general survey and reserved for
special emphasis may now be remarked upon. They will show conclusively
that there were personal and economic reasons why the Indians, some of
them at least, were drawn irresistibly towards the South. The patronage of
the Indian Office has always been more or less of a local thing.
Communities adjoining Indian reservations usually consider, and with just
cause because of long-established practice, that all positions in the
field service, as for example, agencies and traderships, are the
perquisites, so to speak, of the locality. It was certainly true before
the war that Texas and Arkansas had some such understanding as to Indian
Territory, for only southerners held office there and, from among the
southerners, Texans and Arkansans received the preference always. It
happened too that the higher officials in Washington were almost
invariably southern men.

The granting of licenses to traders rested with the superintendent and
everything goes to show that, in the fifties and sixties, applications for
license were scrutinized very closely by the southern superintendents with
a view to letting no objectionable person, from the standpoint of southern
rights, get into the territory. The Holy See itself could never have been
more vigilant in protecting colonial domains against the introduction of
heresy. The same vigilance was exercised in the hiring of agency
employees, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and the like. Having full
discretionary power in the premises, the superintendents could easily
interpret the law to suit themselves. They could also evade it in their
own interests and frequently did so. One notorious case[95] of this sort
came up in connection with Superintendent Drew, who gave permits to his
friends to "peddle" in the Indian country without requiring of them the
necessary preliminary of a bond. Traders once in the country had
tremendous influence with the Indians, especially with those of a certain
class whom ordinarily the missionaries could not reach. Then, as before
and since, Indian traders were not men of the highest moral character by
any means. Too often, on the contrary, they were of degraded character,
thoroughly unscrupulous, proverbial for their defiance of the law, general
illiteracy, and corrupt business practices. It stands to reason that such
men, if they had themselves been selected with an eye single to the cause
of a particular section and knew that solicitude in its interests would
mean great latitude to themselves and favorable reports of themselves to
the department at Washington, would spare no efforts and hesitate at no
means to make it their first concern, provided, of course, that it did not
interfere with their own monetary schemes.

To cap the climax, the last and greatest circumstance to be noted, if only
because of the great weight it carried with the Indians when it was
brought into the argument by the secessionists, is that practically all of
the Indian money held in trust for the individual tribes by the United
States government was invested in southern stocks;[96] in Florida 7's, in
Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, Missouri,
Virginia, and Tennessee 6's, in North Carolina and Tennessee 5's, and the
like. To tell the truth, only the merest minimum of it was secured by
northern bonds. The southerners asserted for the Indians' benefit, that
all these securities would be forfeited[97] by the war. Sufficient is the
fact, that the position of the Indians[98] was unquestionably difficult.
With so much to draw them southward, our only wonder is, that so many of
them stayed with the North.

II. INDIAN TERRITORY IN ITS RELATIONS WITH TEXAS AND ARKANSAS

For the participation of the southern Indians in the American Civil War,
the states of Texas and Arkansas were more than measurably responsible.
Indian Territory, or that part of the Indian country that was historically
known as such, lay between them. Its southern frontage was along the Red
River; and that stream, flowing with only slight sinuosity downward to its
junction with the Mississippi, gave to Indian Territory a long diagonal,
controlled, as far as situation went, entirely by Texas. Texas lay on the
other side of the river and she lay also on almost the whole western
border of Indian Territory.[99] She was, consequently, in possession of a
rare opportunity, geographically, for exercising influence, should need
for such ever arise. Running parallel with the Red River and northward
about one hundred miles, was the Canadian. Between the two rivers were
three huge Indian reservations, the most western was the Leased District
of the Wichitas and allied bands, the middle one was the Chickasaw, and
the eastern, the Choctaw.[100] The Indian occupants of these three
reservations were, therefore, and sometimes to their sorrow, be it said,
the very next door neighbors of the Texans. The Choctaws were, likewise,
the next door neighbors of the Arkansans who joined them on the east; but
the relations between Arkansans and Choctaws seem not to have been so
close or so constant during the period before the war as were the
relations between the Choctaws and the Texans on the one hand and the
Cherokees and the Arkansans on the other.

The Cherokees dwelt, like the Choctaws, over against Arkansas but north of
the Canadian River and in close proximity to Fort Smith, the headquarters
of the Southern Superintendency.[101] Their territory was not so compactly
placed as was the territory of the other tribes; and, in its various
parts, it passes, necessarily, under various designations. There was the
"Cherokee Outlet," a narrow tract south of Kansas that had no definite
western limit. It was supposed to be a passage way to the hunting grounds
of the great plains beyond. Then there was the "Cherokee Strip," the
Kansas extension of the outlet, and for most of its extent originally and
legally a part of it. The territorial organization of Kansas had made the
two distinct. Finally, as respects the more insignificant portions of the
Cherokee domain, there were the "Cherokee Neutral Lands," already
sufficiently well commented upon. They were insignificant, not in point of
acreage but of tribal authority operating within them. They lay in the
southeastern corner of Kansas and constituted, against their will and
against the law, her southeastern counties. They were separated, to their
own discomfiture and disadvantage, from the Cherokee Nation proper by the
reservation of the Quapaws, of the Senecas, and of the confederated
Senecas and Shawnees. This Cherokee Nation lay, as has already been
indicated, over against Arkansas and north of the northeastern section of
the Choctaw country. The Arkansas River formed part of the boundary
between the two tribal domains. So much then for the location of the
really great tribes, but where were the lesser?

[Illustration: COLONEL DOWNING, CHEROKEE [_From Smithsonian Institution,
Bureau of American Ethnology_]]

The Quapaws, the Senecas, and the confederated Senecas and Shawnees, the
most insignificant of the lesser, occupied the extreme northeastern corner
of Indian Territory and, therefore, bordered upon the southwestern corner
of Missouri. The Creeks lived between the Arkansas River, inclusive of its
Red Fork, and the Canadian River, having the Cherokees to the east and
north of them, the Choctaws and Chickasaws to the south, and the Seminoles
to the southwest, between the Canadian and its North Fork. The Indians of
the Leased District have already been located.

In the years preceding the Civil War, the interest of Texas and of
Arkansas in Indian Territory manifested itself, not in a covetous desire
to dispossess the Indians of their lands, as was, unfortunately for
national honor, the case in Kansas, but in an effort to keep the actual
country true to the South, settled by slaveholders, Indian or white, as
occasion required or opportunity offered. When sectional affairs became
really tense after the formation of the Republican Party, they redoubled
their energies in that direction, working always through the rich,
influential, and intelligent half-breeds, some of whom had property
interests and family connections in the states operating upon them.[102]
The half-breeds were essentially a planter class, institutionally more
truly so than were the inhabitants of the border slave states. It is
therefore not surprising that, during the excitement following Abraham
Lincoln's nomination and election, identically the same political agencies
worked among them as among their white neighbors and events in Indian
Territory kept perfect pace with events in adjoining states.

The first of these that showed strong sectional tendencies came in
January, 1861, when the Chickasaws, quite on their own initiative
apparently, met in a called session of their legislature to consider how
best the great tribes might conduct themselves with reference to the
serious political situation then shaping itself in the United States.
There is some evidence that the Knights of the Golden Circle had been
active among the Indians as they had been in Arkansas[103] during the
course of the late presidential campaign. At all events, the red men knew
full well of passing occurrences among their neighbors and they certainly
knew how matters were progressing in Texas. There the State Rights Party
was asserting itself in no doubtful terms. For the time being, however,
the Chickasaws contented themselves with simply passing an act,[104]
January 5, suggesting an inter-tribal conference and arranging for the
executive appointment of a Chickasaw delegation to it. The authorities of
the other tribes were duly notified[105] and to the Creek was given the
privilege of naming time and place.

The Inter-tribal Council assembled at the Creek Agency,[106] February 17,
but comparatively few delegates were in attendance. William P. Ross, a
graduate[107] of Princeton and a nephew of John Ross, the principal chief
of the Cherokees, went as the head of the Cherokee delegation. It was he
who reported the scanty attendance,[108] saying that there were no
Chickasaws present, no Choctaws, but only Creeks, Seminoles, and
Cherokees. Why it happened so can not now be exactly determined but to it
may undoubtedly be ascribed the outcome; for the council did nothing that
was not perfectly compatible with existing friendly relations between the
great tribes and the United States government. John Ross, in instructing
his delegates, had strictly enjoined caution and discretion[109]. William
P. Ross and his associates seem to have managed to secure the observance
of both. Perchance it was Chief Ross's[110] known aversion to an
interference in matters that did not concern the Indians, except very
indirectly, and the consciousness that his influence in the council would
be immense, probably all-powerful, that caused the Chickasaws to draw back
from a thing they had themselves so ill-advisedly planned. It is, however,
just possible that, between the time of issuing the call and of assembling
the council, they crossed on their own responsibility the boundary of
indecision and resolved, as most certainly had the Choctaws, that their
sympathies and their interests were with the South. It might well be
supposed that in this perilous hour their thoughts would have travelled
back some thirty years and they would have remembered what havoc the same
state-rights doctrine, now presented so earnestly for their acceptance,
although it scarcely fitted their case, had then wrought in their
concerns. Strangely enough none of the tribes seems to have charged the
gross injustice of the thirties exclusively to the account of the South.
On the contrary, they one and all charged it against the federal
government, against the states as a whole, and so, rightly or wrongly, the
nation had to pay for the inconsistency of Jackson's procedure, a
procedure that could so illogically recognize the supremacy of federal law
in one matter and the supremacy of state law in another matter that was
precisely its parallel.

The decision of the Choctaws had found expression in a series of
resolutions under date of February 7. They are worthy of being quoted
entire.

    February 7, 1861.

    RESOLUTIONS _expressing the feelings and sentiments of the General
    Council of the Choctaw Nation in reference to the political
    disagreement existing between the Northern and Southern States of the
    American Union._

    _Resolved by the General Council of the Choctaw Nation assembled_,
    That we view with deep regret and great solicitude the present unhappy
    political disagreement between the Northern and Southern States of the
    American Union, tending to a permanent dissolution of the Union and
    the disturbance of the various important relations existing with that
    Government by treaty stipulations and international laws, and
    portending much injury to the Choctaw government and people.

    _Resolved further_, That we must express the earnest desire and ready
    hope entertained by the entire Choctaw people, that any and all
    political disturbances agitating and dividing the people of the
    various States may be honorably and speedily adjusted; and the example
    and blessing, and fostering care of their General Government, and the
    many and friendly social ties existing with their people, continue for
    the enlightenment in moral and good government and prosperity in the
    material concerns of life to our whole population.

    _Resolved further_, That in the event a permanent dissolution of the
    American Union takes place, our many relations with the General
    Government must cease, and we shall be left to follow the natural
    affections, education, institutions, and interests of our people,
    which indissolubly bind us in every way to the destiny of our
    neighbors and brethren of the Southern States upon whom we are
    confident we can rely for the preservation of our rights of life,
    liberty, and property, and the continuance of many acts of friendship,
    general counsel, and material support.

    _Resolved further_, That we desire to assure our immediate neighbors,
    the people of Arkansas and Texas, of our determination to observe the
    amicable relations in every way so long existing between us, and the
    firm reliance we have, amid any disturbance with other States, the
    rights and feelings so sacred to us will remain respected by them and
    be protected from the encroachments of others.

    _Resolved further_, That his excellency the principal chief be
    requested to inclose, with an appropriate communication from himself,
    a copy of these resolutions to the governors of the Southern States,
    with the request that they be laid before the State convention of each
    State, as many as have assembled at the date of their reception, and
    that in such as have not they be published in the newspapers of the
    State.

    _Resolved_, That these resolutions take effect and be in force from
    and after their passage.

    Approved February 7, 1861.[111]

These resolutions of the Choctaw Council are in the highest degree
interesting in the matter both of their substance and of their time of
issue. The information is not forthcoming as to how the Choctaws received
the invitation of the Chickasaw legislature to attend an inter-tribal
council; but, later on, in April, 1861, the Choctaw delegation in
Washington, made up of P. P. Pitchlynn, Samuel Garland, Israel Folsom, and
Peter Folsom, assured the Commissioner of Indian Affairs that the Choctaw
Nation intended to remain neutral,[112] which assurance was interpreted
to mean simply that the Choctaws would be inactive spectators of events,
expressing no opinion, in word or deed, one way or the other. The
Chickasaw delegation gave the same assurance and at about the same time
and place. Now what is to be concluded? Is it to be supposed that the Act
of January 5, 1861 in no wise reflected the sentiments of a tribe as a
whole and similarly the Resolutions of February 7, 1861, or that the
tribal delegations were, in April, utterly ignorant of the real attitude
of their respective constituents? The answer is to be found in the
following most interesting and instructive letter, written by S. Orlando
Lee to Commissioner Dole from Huntingdon, Long Island, March 15,
1862:[113]

    Thinking you and the government would like to hear something about the
    state of affairs among the Choctaws last summer and the influences
    which induced them to take their present position I will write you
    what I know. I was a missionary teacher at Spencer Academy for two
    years and refer you to Hon. Walter Lowrie Gen. Sec. of the Pres. Board
    of Foreign Missions for information as to my character &c. I left
    Spencer June 13th & the nation June 24th but have heard directly from
    there twice since, the last time as late as Sept 6th. So that I can
    speak of occurrences as late as that.

    After South Carolina passed her secession ordinance in Dec. 1860 there
    was a public attempt to excite the Choctaws and Chickasaws as a
    beginning hoping to bring in the other tribes afterwards. Many of the
    larger slaveholders (who are nearly all half breeds) had been gained
    before and Capt. R. M. Jones was the leader of the secessionists. The
    country was full of lies about the intentions of the new
    administration. The border papers in Arkansas & Texas republished from
    the New York & St. Louis papers a part of a sentence from Hon. W. H.
    Seward's speech at Chicago during the election campaign of 1860 to
    this effect "And Indian Territory south of Kansas must be vacated by
    the Indian" (These words do occur in the report of Mr. Seward's
    Chicago speech as published in New York Evening Post Weekly for I
    read it myself). This produced intense excitement of course and to add
    to the effect the Secessionist Journals charged that another prominent
    republican had proposed to drive the indians out of Indian Ter. in a
    speech in congress. "This" they were told "is the policy of the new
    administration. The abolitionists want your lands--we will protect
    you. Your only safety is to join the South." Again they were told
    "that the South must succeed in gaining their independence and the
    money of the indians being invested in the stocks of Southern states
    the stocks would be cancelled & the indians would lose their money
    unless they joined the south, if they did that the stocks would be
    reissued to the Confederate States for them." Their special
    commissioners Peter Folsom &c, who came to Washington to get the half
    million of dollars for claims, reported that they got along very well
    until they were asked if they had slaves after that they said they
    could do nothing. Sampson Folsom said however that he thought they
    would have succeeded had it not been for the attack on Sumpter--He
    said President Lincoln then told them "He would not give them a dollar
    until the close of the war." An interesting fact in relation to these
    commissioners is that they came to Washington by way of _Montgomery_ &
    were when they reached Washington probably all, except Judge Garland,
    secessionists. Thus all influences were in favor of the rebels--Where
    could the indians go for light--The former indian agent Cooper was a
    Col. in the rebel service. The oldest missionary who has undoubtedly
    more influence with the Choctaws than any other white man is an ardent
    secessionist believing firmly both in the right & in the final success
    of the rebel cause--He (Dr. Kingsbury) prays as earnestly & fervently
    for the success of the rebels as any one among us does for the success
    of the Union cause. The son of another, Mr. Hodgkin, is a captain in
    the rebel service--another Mr. Stark actively assisted in organizing a
    company acted as sec. of secessionist meetings &c. Even Mr. Reid
    superintendant of Spencer was confident the rebels could never be
    subdued and thought when the treaty should be made they ought in
    justice to have Ind. Territory. Again when Fort Smith was evacuated
    the rebel forces were on the way up the Ark. river to attack it & the
    garrison evacuated it in the night which looked to the Indians (if
    not to the white men) as if the northerners were afraid. The same was
    true of Fort Washitaw where our forces left in the night and were
    actually pursued for several days by the Texans. Thus matters stood
    when Col. Pitchlynn the resident Com. of the Choctaws at Washington
    returned home. He gave all his influence to have the Choctaws take a
    neutral position. The chief had called the council to meet June 1st. &
    Col. P. so far succeeded as to induce him to prepare a message
    recommending neutrality. Col. P. was promptly reported as an
    _abolitionist_ and _visited_ & _threatened_ by a Texas Vigilance
    committee.

    The Council met at Doaksville seven miles from Red River & of course
    from Texas. It was largely attended by white men from Texas our
    Choctaw neighbors who attended said the place was full of white men.

    The Council did not organize until June 4th or 5th (I forget which).
    In the meanwhile the white men & half bloods had a secession meeting
    when it leaked out through Col. Cooper that the Chief Hudson had
    prepared a message recommending neutrality at which Robert M. Jones
    was so indignant that he made a furious speech in which he declared
    that "any one who opposed secession ought to be hung" "and any
    suspicious persons ought to be hung." Hudson was frightened and when
    the Council was organized sent in a message recommending that
    commissioners be appointed to negotiate a treaty with the Confederates
    and that in the meantime a regiment be organized under Col. Cooper for
    the Confed. army.

    This was finally done but not for a week for the Choctaws were
    reluctant. They feared that their action would result in the
    destruction of the nation. Said Joseph P. Folsom, a member of the
    council & a graduate of Dartmouth College New Hampshire, "We are
    choosing in what way we shall die." Judge Wade said to me, "We expect
    that the Choctaws will be buried. That is what we think will be the
    end of this." Judge W. is a member of the Senate (for the Choctaw
    Council is composed of a Senate & lower house chosen by the people in
    districts & the constitution is modeled very much after those of the
    states.) & he has been a chief. Others said to me "If the north was
    here so we could be protected we would stand up for the north but now
    if we do not go in for the south the Texans will come over here and
    kill us." Mr. Reid told me a day or two before we left that he had
    become convinced during a trip for two or three days through the
    country that the _full bloods_ were strongly for the north. I am sure
    it _was so then_ & it was the opinion of the missionaries that if we
    had all taken the position, that we would not leave, some of us had
    been warned to do so by Texan vigilance committees, we could have
    raised a thousand men who would have armed in our defence--Our older
    brethren told us that this would hasten the destruction of the indians
    as they would be crushed before any help could come.--We thought this
    would probably be the case and the missionaries who were most strongly
    union in sentiment left.

    One of the number Rev. John Edwards had been hiding for his life from
    Texan & half blood ruffians for two weeks & we at Spencer had had the
    _honor_ to be visited by a Texas committee searching for arms.

    I continue my narrative from a letter from one of our teachers who was
    detained when we left by the illness of his wife & who left Spencer
    Sept. 5th & the Nation Sept. 9th. He says Col. Coopers regiment was
    filled up with Texans "The half breeds after involving the full bloods
    in the war have rather drawn back themselves and but few of them have
    enlisted & gone to the war." This indicates that the full bloods have
    at last yielded to the pressure and joined the rebels. The
    missionaries who remained would generally advise them to do this.

    The Choctaw commissioners met Albert Pike rebel commissioner & made a
    treaty with him, with reference to this he says "The Choctaws rec'd
    quite a bundle of promises from the rebel government. Their treaty
    gives their representative a seat in the rebel congress, acknowledges
    the right of the Choctaws to give testimony in all courts in the C.
    S., exempts them from the expences of the war, their soldiers are to
    be paid 20$ a month by the C. S. during the war, the C. S. assume the
    debts due the Choctaws by the U. S., they have the privilege of coming
    in as a state into the Confederacy with equal rights if they wish it,
    or remain as they are, the C. S. to sustain their schools _after the
    war_, they guarantee them against all intrusion on their lands by
    white men, allow them to garrison the forts in their territory with
    their own troops if they wish it said troops to be paid by the C.
    S."--Here is a list of promises and when I think of these, of the
    belief of their oldest missionaries in the final success of the
    rebels, of the fact that all the old Officers of the U. S. government
    were in the service of the rebels, of the occupation of the forts
    there by rebels, of the activity of a knot of bitter disunionists led
    by Capt. Jones, who has long been a very influential man, of the Texas
    mob law which considered it a crime for a young man to refuse to
    volunteer, of the fact that there was no way for them to hear the
    truth as to the designs of the U. S. government concerning them,
    except through Col. Pitchlyn who was soon silenced & of the falsehoods
    told them as to the designs of the Government, I do not wonder that
    they have joined the rebels.

    I saw strong men completely unmanned even to floods of tears by the
    leaving of Dr. Hobbs and the thoughts of what was before them. I heard
    men say they did not want to fight but expected to be forced to do it.

    I trust the government will consider the circumstances of the case &
    deal gently, considerately with the indians. I do not like to write
    such things of my brother missionaries but they are I believe facts &
    though I love some of them very much I still must say that, except
    Rev. Mr. Byington who was doubtful & Rev. Mr. Balantine a missionary
    to the Chickasaws who was union, all the ordained missionaries
    belonging to the Choctaw & Chickasaw Mission of the Presbyterian Board
    who remain there were victims of the madness which swept over the
    South, were secessionists--One or two of the three Laymen who remained
    were union men--Cyrus Kingsbury son of Rev. Dr. K. being one....

The failure of the United States government to give the Indians, in
season, the necessary assurance that they would be protected, no matter
what might happen, can not be too severely criticized. It indicated a very
short-sighted policy and was due either to a tendency to ignore the
Indians as people of no importance or to a lack of harmony and coöperation
among the departments at Washington. Such an assurance of continued
protection was not even framed until the second week in May and then the
Indian country was already threatened by the secessionists. Moreover, it
was framed and intended to be given by one department, the Interior, and
its fulfilment left to another, the War. It went out from the Indian
Office in the form of a circular letter,[114] addressed by Commissioner
William P. Dole to the chief executive[115] in each of the five great
tribes. It assured the Indians that President Lincoln had no intention of
interfering with their domestic institutions or of allowing government
agents or employees to interfere and that the War Department had been
appealed to to furnish all needed defense according to treaty guaranties.
The new southern superintendent, William G. Coffin of Indiana, was made
the bearer of the missive; but, unfortunately, quite a little time
elapsed[116] before the military situation[117] in the West would allow
him to assume his full duties or to reach his official headquarters,[118]
and, in the interval, he was detailed for other work. The Indians,
meanwhile, were left to their own devices and were obliged to look out for
their own defense as best they could.

To all appearances neither the legislative action of the Chickasaws and of
the Choctaws nor the work of the inter-tribal council was, at the time of
occurrence, reported officially to the United States government or, if
reported officially, then not pointedly so as to reveal its real bearings
upon the case in hand. All the agents within Indian Territory were as
usual southern men;[119] but may not have been directly responsible or
even cognizant of this particular action of their charges. The records
show that practically all of them, Cooper, Garrett, Cowart, Leeper, and
Dorn, were absent[120] from their posts, with or without leave, the first
part of the new year and that every one of them became or was already an
active secessionist.[121]

It has been authenticated and is well understood today that, as the
Southern States, one by one, declared themselves out of the Union or were
getting themselves into line for so doing, they prepared to further the
cause of secession among their neighbors and, for the purpose, sent agents
or commissioners to them, who organized the movement very much as the
Committees of Correspondence did a similar movement prior to the American
Revolution. In short, in the spring of 1861, the seceding states entered
upon active proselytism and at least two of them extended their labors to
and among the Indians. Those two were Texas and Arkansas. Missouri also
worked with the same end in view, so did Colorado, but apparently not so
much with the great tribes of Oklahoma as with the politically less
important of Kansas. Colorado, it is true, did operate to some extent upon
the Cherokees of the Outlet and upon the Wichitas, but mostly upon the
Indians of the western plains. No one can deny that, in the interests of
the Confederate cause, the project of sending emissaries even to the
Indians was a wise measure or refuse to admit that the contrasting
inactivity and positive indifference of the North was foolhardy in the
extreme. It indicated a self-complacency for which there was no
justification. More than that can with truth be said; for, from the
standpoint of political wisdom and foresight, the inactivity where the
Indians were concerned was conduct most reprehensible.

While Chickasaws and Choctaws, unsolicited,[122] were expressing
themselves, the secessionist sentiment was developing rapidly in Texas.
By the middle of February, conditions were such that steps might be taken
to order the evacuation of the state by Federal troops. This was finally
done under authority of the Committee of Public Safety[123] and the
general in command, D. E. Twiggs of Georgia, compliantly yielded. His
small show of resistance seemed, under the circumstances, a mere pretense,
although he had his reasons, and good ones too, perfectly satisfactory to
himself, for doing what he did. Two main conditions were attached to the
agreement of surrender;[124] one, exacted by General Twiggs, to the effect
that his men be allowed to retain their arms, commissary stores, camp and
garrison equipage, and the means of transportation; the other, exacted by
the Texan commissioners, that the troops depart by way of the coast and
not overland, as the United States War Department had designed when, a
short time before, it had ordered a similar removal.[125] The precaution
of forcing a coastwise journey[126] was taken by the Texan commissioners
to consume time and to prevent the troops being retained in states or
territories through which transit lay for possible future use against
Texas. The easy compliance of General Twiggs[127] undoubtedly merits some
censure and yet was perfectly well justified to his own conscience by the
exigencies of the situation and by the fact that he had repeatedly asked
for orders as to what he should do in the event of an emergency and had
received none. The circumstance of his surrender and the resulting triumph
of the secessionist element could not fail to have its effect upon the
watchful Indians to whom the exhibition of present power was everything.

That the Texan secessionists fully appreciated the strategic position of
the Indian nations and the absolute necessity of making some sort of terms
with them was brought out by the action of the convention at its first
session. An ordinance was passed "to secure the friendship and
co-operation of the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole
Nations of Indians;" and three men, James E. Harrison, James Bourland, and
Charles A. Hamilton, were appointed as commissioners[128] "to proceed to
said nations and invite their prompt co-operation in the formation of a
Southern Confederacy."[129]

Now before following these men in the execution of their mission, it may
be advisable, for breadth of view, to illustrate how Texas still further
made Indian relations an issue most prominent in all the earlier stages of
her secession movement; but at the very outset it must be admitted that,
in so doing, she differentiated carefully between the civilized and the
uncivilized tribes. With the one group she was ready to seek an alliance,
offensive and defensive, but with the other to wage a relentless,
exterminating war. The failure of the United States central government to
protect her against the aggressions and the atrocities so-called of the
wild tribes was cited by her as one principal justification for withdrawal
from the Union,[130] her obvious purpose being to gain thereby the
adherence of the northern counties, non-slaveholding but frontier. Almost
conversely, on the other hand, Governor Houston gave as one good and
sufficient reason for not withdrawing from the Union, the fear that should
the Union be dissolved the wild tribes, who were now, in a measure,
restrained from committing depredations and enormities by the very nature
of their treaty guaranties, would be literally let loose upon Texas.[131]
As far as the civilized tribes were concerned, however, all were of one
mind and that took the form of the conviction that so great was the
necessity of gaining and holding the confidence of the Indians, that Texas
must not procrastinate in joining her fortunes with those of her sister
states in the Confederacy.[132]

James E. Harrison and his colleagues started out upon the performance of
the duties assigned them, February 27, 1861. Their report[133] of
operations and of observations being somewhat difficult of access and its
contents not easily summarized, is herewith appended. Its fullness of
detail is especially to be commended.

    We ... crossed Red River and entered the Chickasaw Nation about thirty
    miles southwest of Fort Washita; visited and held a private conference
    with His Excellency Governor C. Harris and other distinguished men of
    that nation, who fully appreciated our views and the object of our
    mission. They informed us that a convention of the Chickasaws and
    Choctaws was in a few days to convene at Boggy Depot, in the Choctaw
    Nation, to attend to some municipal arrangements. We, in company with
    Governor Harris and others, made our way to Boggy Depot, conferring
    privately with the principal men on our route. We arrived at Boggy
    Depot on the 10th day of March. Their convention or council convened
    on the 11th. Elected a president of the convention (Ex-Governor
    Walker, of the Choctaw Nation); adopted rules of decorum. On the 12th
    we were waited on by a committee of the convention. Introduced as
    commissioners from Texas, we presented our credentials and were
    invited to seats. The convention then asked to hear us, when Mr. James
    E. Harrison addressed them and a crowded auditory upon the subject of
    our mission, setting forth the grounds of our complaint against the
    Government of the United States, the wrongs we had suffered until our
    patience had become exhausted, endurance had ceased to be a virtue,
    our duty to ourselves and children demanded of us a disruption of the
    Government that had ceased to protect us or to regard our rights;
    announced the severance of the old and the organization of a new
    Government of Confederate Sovereign States of the South, with a
    common kindred, common hopes, common interest, and a common destiny;
    discussed the power of the new Government, its influence, and wealth;
    the interest the civilized red man had in this new organization;
    tendering them our warmest sympathy and regard, all of which met the
    cordial approbation of the convention.

    The Choctaws and Chickasaws are entirely Southern and are determined
    to adhere to the fortunes of the South. They were embarrassed in their
    action by the absence of their agents and commissioners at Washington,
    the seat of Government of the Northern Confederacy, seeking a final
    settlement with that Government. They have passed resolutions
    authorizing the raising of a minute company in each county in the two
    nations, to be drilled for actual service when necessary. Their
    convention was highly respectable in numbers and intelligence, and the
    business of the convention was dispatched with such admirable decorum
    and promptness as is rarely met with in similar deliberative bodies
    within the States.

    On the morning of the 13th, hearing that the Creeks (or Maskokys) and
    Cherokees were in council at the Creek agency, on the Arkansas River,
    140 miles distant, we immediately set out for that point, hoping to
    reach them before their adjournment. In this we were disappointed.
    They had adjourned two days before our arrival. We reached that point
    on Saturday evening. On Sunday morning, hearing that there was a
    religious meeting five miles north of the Arkansas River, in the Creek
    Nation, Mr. James E. Harrison attended, which proved to be of the
    utmost importance to our mission. The Reverend Mr. H. S. Buckner was
    present, with Chilly McIntosh, D. N. McIntosh, Judge Marshall, and
    others, examining a translation of a portion of the Scriptures, hymn
    book, and Greek grammar by Mr. Buckner into the Creek language. Mr.
    Buckner showed us great kindness, and did us eminent service, as did
    also Elder Vandiven, at whose house we spent the night and portion of
    the next day with these gentlemen of the Creek Nation, and through
    them succeeded in having a convention of the five nations called by
    Governor Motey Kinnaird, of the Creeks, to meet at North Fork (Creek
    Nation) on the 8th of April.

    In the intermediate time we visited the Cherokee Nation, calling on
    their principal men and citizens, conversing with them freely until
    we reached Tahlequah, the seat of government. Near this place Mr. John
    Ross resides, the Governor of the nation. We called on him officially.
    We were not unexpected, and were received with courtesy, but not with
    cordiality. A long conference was had with him, conducted by Mr.
    Harrison on the part of the commissioners, without, we fear, any good
    result. He was very diplomatic and cautious. His position is the same
    as that held by Mr. Lincoln in his inaugural; declares the Union not
    dissolved; ignores the Southern Government. The intelligence of the
    nation is not with him. Four-fifths, at least, are against his views,
    as we learned from observation and good authorities. He, as we
    learned, had been urged by his people to call a council of the nation
    (he having the only constitutional authority to do so), to take into
    consideration the embarrassed condition of political affairs in the
    States, and to give some expression of their sentiments and
    sympathies. This he has persistently refused to do. His position in
    this is that of Sam. Houston in Texas, and in all probability will
    share the same fate, if not a worse one. His people are already
    oppressed by a Northern population letting a portion of territory
    purchased by them from the United States, to the exclusion of natives,
    and we are creditably informed that the Governors of some two or more
    of the Western free-soil States have recommended their people
    emigrating to settle the Cherokee country. It is due Mr. John Ross, in
    this connection, to say that during our conference with him he
    frequently avowed his sympathy for the South, and that, if Virginia
    and the other Border States seceded from the Government of the United
    States, his people would declare for the Southern Government that
    might be formed. The fact is not to be denied or disguised that among
    the common Indians of the Cherokees there exists a considerable
    abolition influence, created and sustained by one Jones, a Northern
    missionary of education and ability, who has been among them for many
    years, and who is said to exert no small influence with John Ross
    himself.

    From Tahlequah we returned to the Creek Nation, and had great
    satisfaction in visiting their principal men--the McIntoshes,
    Stidhams, Smiths, Vanns, Rosses, Marshalls, and others too numerous to
    mention. Heavy falls of rain occurred about the time the convention
    was to meet at North Fork, which prevented the Chickasaws and Choctaws
    from attending the council, the rivers and creeks being all full and
    impassable. The Creeks, Cherokees, Seminoles, Quapa, and Socks (the
    three latter dependencies of the Creeks) met on the 8th of April.
    After they had organized by calling Motey Kinnaird, the Governor of
    the Creeks, to the chair, a committee was appointed to wait on the
    commissioners present, James E. Harrison and Capt. C. A. Hamilton, and
    invite them to appear in the convention, when, by invitation, Mr.
    Harrison addressed the convention in a speech of two hours. Our views
    were cordially received by the convention. The Creeks are Southern and
    sound to a man, and when desired will show their devotion to our cause
    by acts. They meet in council on the 1st of May, when they will
    probably send delegates to Montgomery to arrange with the Southern
    Government.

    These nations are in a rapid state of improvement. The chase is no
    longer resorted to as means of subsistence, only as an occasional
    recreation. They are pursuing with good success agriculture and stock
    raising. Their houses are well built and comfortable, some of them
    costly. Their farms are well planned and some of them extensive and
    all well cultivated. They are well supplied with schools of learning,
    extensively patronized. They have many churches and a large membership
    of moral, pious deportment. They feel themselves to be in an exposed,
    embarrassed condition. They are occupying a country well suited to
    them, well watered, and fertile, with extensive fields of the very
    best mineral coal, fine salt springs and wells, with plenty of good
    timber, water powers which they are using to an advantage. Pure slate,
    granite, sandstone, blue limestone, and marble are found in abundance.
    All this they regard as inviting Northern aggression, and they are
    without arms, to any extent, or munitions of war. They declare
    themselves Southerners by geographical position, by a common interest,
    by their social system, and by blood, for they are rapidly becoming a
    nation of whites. They have written constitutions, laws, etc., modeled
    after those of the Southern States. We recommend them to the fostering
    care of the South, and that treaty arrangements be entered into with
    them as soon as possible. They can raise 20,000 good fighting men,
    leaving enough at home to attend to domestic affairs, and under the
    direction of an officer from the Southern Government would deal
    destruction to an approaching army from that direction, and in the
    language of one of their principal men:

    "Lincoln may haul his big guns about our prairies in the daytime, but
    we will swoop down upon him at night from our mountains and forests,
    dealing death and destruction to his army."

    No delay should be permitted in this direction. They cannot declare
    themselves until they are placed in a defensible position. The
    Administration of the North is concentrating his forces at Fort
    Washita, about twenty-four miles from the Texas line, and within the
    limits of the Chickasaw Nation. This fort could easily be taken by a
    force of 200 or 300 good men, and it is submitted as to whether in the
    present state of affairs a foreign government should be permitted to
    accumulate a large force on the borders of our country, especially a
    portion containing a large number of disaffected citizens who
    repudiate the action of the State.

    In this connection it may not be improper to state that from North
    Fork to Red River we met over 120 wagons, movers from Texas to Kansas
    and other free States. These people are from Grayton, Collin, Johnson,
    and Denton, a country beautiful in appearance, rich in soil, genial in
    climate, and inferior to none in its capacity for the production of
    the cereals and stock. In disguise, we conversed with them freely.
    They had proposed by the ballot box to abolitionize at least that
    portion of the State. Failing in this, we suppose at least 500 voters
    have returned whence they came.

    All of which is respectfully submitted this April 23, 1861....

Presumably, the suggestions, contained in the closing paragraphs of the
commissioners' report, in so far as they concerned Texas, were immediately
acted upon by her. It was very true, as the commissioners had reported,
that a change was taking place in the disposition of Federal troops within
the Indian country. About the middle of February, a complaint[134] had
been filed at the Indian Office by the Wichita agent, Matthew Leeper, to
the effect that men, claiming to be Choctaws and Chickasaws, were
trespassing upon the Leased District. The Reserve Indians asked for relief
and protection at the hands of their guardian, the United States
government. Shortly afterwards, perhaps in a measure in response to the
appeal or more likely, to a hint that everything was not quite as it
should be on the Texan border, Colonel William H. Emory, First United
States Cavalry, was ordered, March 13,[135] to take post at Fort Cobb. He
was then in Washington and, immediately upon his departure thence, was
ordered, March 18,[136] to form his regiment at Fort Washita instead, word
having come from the commander at that post,[137] in a report of the third
instant, of a threatened attack by Texans. In explanation of a policy so
vacillating, Emory was given to understand that the change of destination
was really made at the solicitation of the agent and delegation of the
Chickasaws. Those men were in Washington, out of reach of and apparently
out of sympathy with, the events transpiring at home. Agent Cooper,
secessionist though he was, probably did not altogether approve of the
interference of the Texans. At any rate, he shared the representations of
the Chickasaw delegation that Fort Washita stood in need of
reënforcement,[138] and the War Department acceded to their request on the
ground that, "The interests of the United States are paramount to those
of the friendly Indians on the reservation near Fort Cobb."[139]

Emory's orders further comprehended a concentration of all the troops at
Fort Washita that were then at that place and at Forts Cobb and
Arbuckle;[140] but the orders were discretionary in their nature and
permitted his leaving a small force at the more northern posts should
circumstances warrant or demand it. On the nineteenth, General Scott had
had a conference with Senator Charles B. Mitchell of Arkansas and, in
deference to Mitchell's opinion, still further modified his orders to
Emory so that, while leaving him the bulk of his discretionary power, he
recommended that, if advisable, Emory retain one company at Fort
Cobb.[141] In any event, one company of infantry was to move in advance
from Fort Arbuckle to Fort Washita.[142]

Up to the twenty-fourth of March, at which time he left Memphis, Colonel
Emory made pretty good time in his attempt to reach his destination; but
from Memphis on his movements were unavoidably and considerably hampered.
Low water in the Arkansas detained him for several days so that he deemed
it prudent to send his orders on ahead to the commanding officer at Fort
Arbuckle "to commence the movement upon Fort Washita, and, in the event of
the latter place being threatened, to march to its support with his whole
force."[143] On reaching Fort Smith, Emory found that matters had come to
a crisis in Arkansas and, touching the disposition of his force and the
objects of his mission, allowed himself to be unduly influenced in his
judgment by men of local predilections.[144] It was upon their advice and
upon the urgent pleadings of Matthew Leeper,[145] Indian agent on the
Leased District, that he exercised his discretionary power as to the
disposal of troops, without listening to his military subordinates[146] or
having viewed the locality for himself. In the interests of these local
petitioners,[147] he even enlarged upon Mitchell's recommendation and
concluded to leave two companies at Fort Cobb as one was deemed altogether
inadequate to the protection of so isolated a post. It never seems to
have occurred to him that the attack would have to come from the south,
from the direction of Fort Washita, and that a force large enough to be
efficient at either Fort Washita or Fort Arbuckle would necessarily
protect Fort Cobb and the Indians of the Leased District.

The position of the Indians in the Leased District was serious in the
extreme. They lived in mortal terror of the Texans and their agent, the
man placed over them by the United States government, was now an avowed
secessionist. He was a Texan and declared, as so many another southerner
did from General Lee down, that honor and loyalty compelled him to go with
his state. In February, he had been in Washington City, settling his
accounts with the government and estimating for the next two quarters in
accordance with the rulings and established usage of the Indian Office. On
his way west and back to his agency, he was waylaid by a man of the name
of "Burrow," very probably Colonel N. B. Burrow, acting under authority
from the state of Arkansas, who despoiled him of part of his travelling
equipment and then suffered him to go on his way.[148] Leeper reached his
agency to find the Indians greatly excited. He endeavored to allay their
fears, assuring them that the Texans would do them no harm. Soon, however,
came his own defection and he thenceforward made use of every means,
either to make the way easy for the Texans or to induce the Indians to
side with them against the United States.

While Emory was dilly-dallying at Fort Smith, the Texans made their
preparations[149] for invading the Indian country and a regiment of
volunteers under William C. Young, once a planter of Braganza County and
now state regimental colonel, moved towards the Red River. There is
something to show that they came at the veiled invitation[150] of the
Indians. At any rate they seem to have felt pretty sure of a welcome[151]
and were close at hand when Colonel Emory reached Fort Washita. He reached
Fort Washita to find that the concentration of troops, even of such as his
ill-advised orders would permit, had not yet fully taken place, that his
supplies had been seized by the Texans, and that a general attack by them
upon the poorly fortified posts was to be hourly expected. Emory,
thereupon, resolved to withdraw from Fort Washita towards Arbuckle and
Cobb. The day after he did so, April 16, Young's troops entered in force.
Emory hurried forward to strengthen Fort Cobb and, indeed, to relieve it,
taking, in his progress, the open prairie road that his cavalry might be
more available. On the way,[152] he was joined by United States troops
from Fort Arbuckle, the Texans in close pursuit. Fort Arbuckle was
occupied by them in turn and then Fort Cobb, Emory never so much as
attempting to enter the place; for he found its garrison in flight to the
northeast. Fugitives all together, the Federal troops, piloted by a
Delaware Indian, Black Beaver,[153] hurried onwards towards Fort
Leavenworth. They seem to have made no lengthy stop until they were safe
across the Arkansas River[154] and their flight may well be said to have
been a precipitous one. Behind them, at Fort Arbuckle, Colonel Young took
possession of abandoned property and placed it in the care of the
Chickasaw Indians,[155] who had materially aided him in his attack. His
next move was to negotiate,[156] unauthoritatively, a treaty with the
Reserve Indians, gaining the promise of their alliance upon the
understanding that the Confederacy, in return, would feed and protect
them. Fort Cobb was rifled and the Indians made rich, in their own
estimation, with booty.[157] Colonel Young seems then to have drawn back
towards the Red River; but for several months he continued to occupy with
his forces,[158] under the authority of Texas and with the consent of the
Chickasaw Indians, the three frontier posts that Emory had been instructed
to guard; viz., Forts Washita, Arbuckle, and Cobb.

If Texas took time by the forelock in her anxiety to secure the Indian
country and its inhabitants, Arkansas most certainly did the same; and, in
the undertaking, various things told to her advantage, among which, not
the least important was the close family relationship existing between her
secessionist governor, Henry M. Rector, and the southern superintendent.
They were cousins and, to all appearances, the best of friends. It is
doubtful if in any state the executive authority thereof worked more
energetically for secession or with greater consistency and promptitude
than in Arkansas. Governor Rector had been elected, in the autumn of 1860,
by the Democrats and old-line Whigs. He belonged to a numerous and most
influential family, land-surveyors most of them, seemingly by inheritance,
and, although from northern or border states originally, strongly
committed to the doctrine of state sovereignty. The family connections
were also powerful socially and politically. The gubernatorial
inauguration came in November, 1860, and from that moment Henry M. Rector
and his host of relations and friends worked for secession.

At the outset, Governor Rector identified the Indian interests with those
of Arkansas. Even in his message[159] of December 11, 1860 he gave it as
his opinion that the two communities must together take measures to
prevent anti-slavery migration. It was rather late in the day, however, to
intimate that men of abolitionist sentiments must not be allowed to cross
the line, and a man of the political acumen of Henry M. Rector must have
known it. Immediately after the general election there were evidences of
great excitement in Arkansas and, when news[160] came that the disused
arsenal at Little Rock was to be occupied by artillery under Captain James
Totten from Fort Leavenworth, it broke out into expressions of public
dissent. Little Rock was scarcely less radical and secessionist in its
views than was Fort Smith and Fort Smith was regarded as a regular hot-bed
of sectionalism. The legislature, too, was filled with state-rights
advocates and some of the actions taken there were almost revolutionary in
their trend. With the new year came new alarms and false reports of what
was to be. Harrell records[161] that the first message over the newly
completed telegraph line between Memphis and Little Rock was a repetition
of the rumor, quite without foundation, that Major Emory had been ordered
from Fort Gibson to reinforce Totten at Little Rock, and that the effect
upon Helena was electrical. It is no wonder that the newspapers and
personal communications[162] of the time showed great intensity of
feeling and a tendency to ring the changes on a single theme.

The public indignation following the receipt of the unsubstantiated rumor
that Totten was to be reënforced seems to have compelled the action of
Governor Rector in taking possession,[163] on February eighth, in the name
of the state of Arkansas, of the United States arsenal at Little Rock;
but, as a matter of fact, Rector needed only an excuse, and a very slight
one at that, for doing more than he had already done to prove his
sectional bias. Nor had he forgotten or neglected the Indians. Indeed,
never at any time did he leave a single stone unturned in his search for
inside and outside support; and, notwithstanding the fact that the
Arkansas Ordinance of Secession was not passed until the sixth of May,
Governor Rector conducted himself, for months before that, as though the
state were a bona fide member of the Confederacy. In all his audacious
venturings, proposals, and acts, he had the full and unquestioning
support, not only of his cousin, Elias Rector,[164] in whose honor Albert
Pike had written the well-known parody[165] on "The Old Scottish
Gentlemen;"[166] but of the leading citizens of Fort Smith and Little
Rock, particularly of those whose previous occupations, residence,
inclinations, or interests had made them conversant with Indian affairs
and, therefore, unusually appreciative of the strategic value of the
Indian country. Under such circumstances, it is not at all surprising that
Governor Rector seized, as he did, the earliest[167] opportunity to
approach the Cherokees. Fort Smith at the junction of the Arkansas and
Poteau Rivers was only eighty miles from Fort Gibson.

Before taking up for special comment Governor Rector's negotiations with
the Cherokees through their principal chief, John Ross, it might be well
to retrace our steps a little in order to show how, in yet other ways,
Arkansas interested herself more than was natural in the concerns of the
Indians and made some of her citizens, in the long run, more than
ordinarily responsible for the development of secessionist sentiment among
the southern tribes.

When David Hubbard, journeying westward as special secessionist
commissioner[168] from Alabama to Arkansas, reached Little Rock--and that
was in the early winter of 1861--he soon discovered that many Arkansans
were not willing for their state to go out of the Union unless she could
take Indian Territory with her. Hubbard's letter,[169] descriptive of the
situation, is very elucidating. It is addressed to Andrew B. Moore,[170]
governor of Alabama, and bears date Kinloch, Alabama, January third.

    MY DEAR SIR: On receipt of your letter and appointment as commissioner
    from Alabama to Arkansas, I repaired to Little Rock and presented my
    credentials to the two houses, and also your letter to Governor
    Rector, by all of whom I was politely received. The Governor of
    Arkansas was every way disposed to further our views, and so were many
    leading and influential members of each house of the Legislature, but
    neither are yet ready for action, because they fear the people have
    not yet made up their minds to go out. The counties bordering on the
    Indian nations--Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws--would
    hesitate greatly to vote for secession, and leave those tribes still
    under the influence of the Government at Washington, from which they
    receive such large stipends and annuities. These Indians are at a spot
    very important, in my opinion, in this great sectional controversy,
    and must be assured that the South will do as well as the North before
    they could be induced to change their alliances and dependence. I have
    much on this subject to say when I get to Montgomery, which cannot
    well be written. The two houses passed resolutions inviting me to meet
    them in representative hall and consult together as to what had best
    be done in this matter. When I appeared men were anxious to know what
    the seceding States intended to do in certain contingencies. My
    appointment gave me no authority to speak as to what any State would
    do, but I spoke freely of what, in my opinion, we ought to do. I took
    the ground that no State which had seceded would ever go back without
    full power being given to protect themselves by vote against
    anti-slavery projects and schemes of every kind. I took the position
    that the Northern people were honest and did fear the divine
    displeasure, both in this world and the world to come, by reason of
    what they considered the national sin of slavery, and that all who
    agreed with me in a belief of their sincerity must see that we could
    not remain quietly in the same Government with them. Secondly, if they
    were dishonest hypocrites, and only lied to impose on others and make
    them hate us, and used anti-slavery arguments as mere pretexts for the
    purpose of uniting Northern sentiment against us, with a view to
    obtain political power and sectional dominion, in that event we ought
    not to live with them. I desired any Unionist present to controvert
    either of these positions, which seemed to cover the whole ground. No
    one attempted either, and I said but little more. I am satisfied, from
    free conversations with members of all parties and with Governor
    Rector, that Arkansas, when compelled to choose, will side with the
    Southern States, but at present a majority would vote the Union
    ticket. Public sentiment is but being formed, but must take that
    direction....

What, in addition to that just cited, Hubbard had to say about the Indians
or about the profit accruing from close contact with them, we have no way
of knowing; but we have a right to be suspicious of the things that have
to be communicated by word of mouth only, especially in this instance,
when we remember that white men have always made the Indians subjects of
exploitation and that Hubbard was the man whom the southern Confederacy
chose for its first commissioner of Indian affairs, also that Hubbard's
first outline of work, as commissioner, in truth, his only outline,
comprehended an extended visit to the Indians before whom he proposed to
expatiate on the financial advantages of an adherence to the Confederacy
and the inevitable financial ruin that must come from continued loyalty to
the Union. All things considered, it would surely seem that in Hubbard's
mind the money question was always uppermost.

But there were others to whom the Indian income was a thing of interest.
At the earlier meeting of the Arkansas convention, a resolution[171] had
been passed, March 9, 1861, authorizing an inquiry to be made into the
annual cost to the United States government of the Indian service west of
Arkansas. The state administration had already seized[172] the Indian
funds on hand, an opportunity to do so having offered itself upon the
occasion of the death[173] of the United States disbursing officer, Major
P. T. Crutchfield. But, later, for fear that this might work prejudice
with the Indians a resolution[174] was passed providing that the money
should not be diverted from its proper uses. Because of such actions and
others of like direction, it is certainly safe to assume that pecuniary
considerations made the frontiersmen of 1861 vitally interested in Indian
affairs. The same influences that moved Hubbard to write his letter to
Governor Moore with special mention of the Indians unquestionably moved
the citizens of Boonsboro to try,[175] without much further ado, the
temper of the Cherokees.

Returning now to Governor Rector and to a recital of his endeavors with
the same Indian people, it is seen that his approach to the Cherokees was
made, as has been already intimated, through their principal chief, John
Ross, and by means of the following most excellently worded letter:

    THE STATE OF ARKANSAS, EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT,
      Little Rock, January 29, 1861.

    TO HIS EXCELLENCY JOHN ROSS,
      Principal Chief Cherokee Nation:

    SIR: It may now be regarded as almost certain that the States having
    slave property within their borders will, in consequence of repeated
    Northern aggressions, separate themselves and withdraw from the
    Federal Government.

    South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana
    have already, by action of the people, assumed this attitude.
    Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, and
    Maryland will probably pursue the same course by the 4th of March
    next. Your people, in their institutions, productions, latitude, and
    natural sympathies, are allied to the common brotherhood of the
    slaveholding States. Our people and yours are natural allies in war
    and friends in peace. Your country is salubrious and fertile, and
    possesses the highest capacity for future progress and development by
    the application of slave labor. Besides this, the contiguity of our
    territory with yours induces relations of so intimate a character as
    to preclude the idea of discordant or separate action.

[Illustration: JOHN ROSS, PRINCIPAL CHIEF OF THE CHEROKEES [_From
Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology_]]

    It is well established that the Indian country west of Arkansas is
    looked to by the incoming administration of Mr. Lincoln as fruitful
    fields, ripe for the harvest of abolitionism, free-soilers, and
    Northern mountebanks.

    We hope to find in your people friends willing to co-operate with the
    South in defense of her institutions, her honor, and her firesides,
    and with whom the slaveholding States are willing to share a common
    future, and to afford protection commensurate with your exposed
    condition and your subsisting monetary interests with the General
    Government.

    As a direct means of expressing to you these sentiments, I have
    dispatched my aide-de-camp, Lieut. Col. J. J. Gaines, to confer with
    you confidentially upon these subjects, and to report to me any
    expressions of kindness and confidence that you may see proper to
    communicate to the governor of Arkansas, who is your friend and the
    friend of your people. Respectfully, your obedient servant,

        HENRY M. RECTOR, Governor of Arkansas.[176]

Lieutenant Gaines duly started out upon his mission and upon reaching Fort
Smith interviewed Superintendent Rector and received from him a letter of
introduction[177] to John Ross, which was, in effect, a hearty endorsement
of the governor's project. An inkling of what Gaines was about soon came
to the ears of A. B. Greenwood, an Arkansan, a state-rights man, and
United States commissioner of Indian affairs. At the moment he was the
official, intent upon doing his duty, nothing more. It was then in his
official capacity that he straightway demanded of Agent Cowart an
explanation of Gaines's movements; but Cowart was privy to Governor
Rector's plans undoubtedly, a Georgian, a secessionist, and one of those
illiterate, disreputable, untrustworthy characters that frontier or
garrison towns seem always to produce or to attract, the kind,
unfortunately for its own reputation and for the Indian welfare, that the
United States government has so often seen fit to select for its Indian
agents. More than that, Cowart was a man of such base principles that he
could commercialize with impunity a great cause and calmly continue to
hold office under and to draw pay from one government while secretly
plotting against it in the interests of another. On this occasion he
attempted a denial[178] of the presence of Rector's commissioner at Fort
Smith; but the Indian Office had soon good proof[179] that a commissioner
had been there and that he had proceeded thence to the Cherokee country.
It was no other than Gaines, of course, who, when once he had delivered
the Rector letters to Ross, saw fit, in the further interests of his
mission, to attend the inter-tribal council at the Creek Agency.

John Ross did not reply to Governor Rector's communication until the
anniversary of George Washington's birthday and he then expressed the same
ideas of concern, of sympathy, but also those of positive neutrality that
had characterized his advice to the Indian conferees. He scouted, though,
the very idea of the incoming administration's planning to abolitionize
the Indian country while at the same time he manifested his utter
disapproval of it. This is what he said:

    TAHLEQUAH, CHEROKEE NATION, February 22, 1861.

    HIS EXCELLENCY HENRY M. RECTOR, Governor of Arkansas:

    Sir: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of Your Excellency's
    communication of the 29th ultimo, per your aide-de-camp, Lieut. Col.
    J. J. Gaines.

    The Cherokees cannot but feel a deep regret and solicitude for the
    unhappy differences which at present disturb the peace and quietude of
    the several States, especially when it is understood that some of the
    slave States have already separated themselves and withdrawn from the
    Federal Government and that it is probable others will also pursue the
    same course.

    But may we not yet hope and trust in the dispensation of Divine power
    to overrule the discordant elements for good, and that, by the counsel
    of the wisdom, virtue, and patriotism of the land, measures may
    happily be adopted for the restoration of peace and harmony among the
    brotherhood of States within the Federal Union.

    The relations which the Cherokee people sustain toward their white
    brethren have been established by subsisting treaties with the United
    States Government, and by them they have placed themselves under the
    "protection of the United States and of no other sovereign whatever."
    They are bound to hold no treaty with any foreign power, or with any
    individual State, nor with the citizens of any State. On the other
    hand, the faith of the United States is solemnly pledged to the
    Cherokee Nation for the protection of the right and title in the
    lands, conveyed to them by patent, within their territorial
    boundaries, as also for the protection of all other of their national
    and individual rights and interests of persons and property. Thus the
    Cherokee people are inviolably allied with their white brethren of
    the United States in war and friends in peace. Their institutions,
    locality, and natural sympathies are unequivocally with the
    slave-holding States. And the contiguity of our territory to your
    State, in connection with the daily, social, and commercial
    intercourse between our respective citizens, forbids the idea that
    they should ever be otherwise than steadfast friends.

    I am surprised to be informed by Your Excellency that "it is well
    established that the Indian country west of Arkansas is looked to by
    the incoming administration of Mr. Lincoln as fruitful fields ripe for
    the harvest of abolitionism, free-soilers, and Northern mountebanks."
    As I am sure that the laborers will be greatly disappointed if they
    shall expect in the Cherokee country "fruitful fields ripe for the
    harvest of abolitionism," &c., you may rest assured that the Cherokee
    people will never tolerate the propagation of any obnoxious fruit upon
    their soil.

    And in conclusion I have the honor to reciprocate the salutation of
    friendship.

    I am, sir, very respectfully, Your Excellency's obedient servant,

        JNO. ROSS, Principal Chief Cherokee Nation.[180]

The Arkansas state convention, sanctioned by popular vote, met, by
authority of the governor's proclamation, March fourth. Its members were
inclined to temporize, however; for, as Harrell says, they were
coöperationists[181] rather than secessionists and their policy of
temporizing they carried out even in the provision made for reassembling
after adjournment. David Walker, the president of the convention, was out
of sympathy with this; and, at the first news of the attack upon Fort
Sumter and while passion and excitement were still at fever heat,
called[182] an extra session for the sixth of May. The regular session was
not to come until the nineteenth of August. Coincidently Governor Rector
again showed where his sympathies lay by refusing[183] President Lincoln's
call for troops.

The Arkansas Ordinance of Secession was passed on the sixth of May. S. R.
Cockrell had proved himself a good prophet; for, writing jubilantly to L.
P. Walker, on the twenty-first of April, on the progress of secession, he
had said,[184] "Arkansas will go out 6th of May before breakfast. The
Indians come next." His closing remark had some foundation for its
utterance. Intelligent and prominent Indians were to be found in the very
ranks of the Arkansas secessionists. E. C. Boudinot, a Cherokee, an enemy
and rival of John Ross, and later Cherokee delegate in the Confederate
Congress, was secretary[185] of the convention. M. Kennard, a leading and
a principal Creek chief, seems also to have been influential. The alliance
of the Indians was yet being sought.[186]

The secession ordinance once safely launched, the Arkansas convention
turned its attention without equivocation to Indian concerns. On the tenth
of May, for instance, it followed the example set by Texas and passed a
resolution,[187] authorizing the president of the convention to appoint
three delegates to visit Indian Territory. The men appointed were, S. L.
Griffith of Sebastian County (the same man, interestingly enough to whom
the United States government had recently offered[188] the Southern
Superintendency), J. Murphy of Madison County, and G. W. Laughinghouse of
St. Francis County. Two of these counties were on or near the border.
Sebastian was on the border and Madison not far inland, so Griffith and
Murphy very probably realized the full significance of their mission. On
the eleventh of May, the convention tried to pass another resolution,[189]
indicative of a community of interests between Arkansas and the Indian
country. This resolution failed, but, had it passed, it would have prayed
the president of the Confederate States to erect a military department or
division out of Arkansas and Indian Territory. As it was, the convention
contented itself, on this occasion, with empowering[190] Brigadier-general
Pearce[191] to coöperate with Brigadier-general McCulloch.[192] It took
this action on the twenty-first of May and on the twenty-eighth it
received a communication[193] from Elias Rector concerning the Choctaws
and Chickasaws.

Almost simultaneously with this legislative activity, solicitation of the
Indians came from yet other directions. On the eighth of May,
Brigadier-general B. Burroughs of the Arkansas militia took it upon
himself to make an appeal to the Chickasaws, which he did in this wise:

    HEADQUARTERS EIGHTH BRIGADE, FIRST DIVISION, ARKANSAS MILITIA,
      Fort Smith, Ark., May 8, 1861.

    GOV. C. HARRIS: To-day we have information that Arkansas, in
    Convention, has seceded, by a vote 69 to 1. Tennessee has also
    seceded, and made large appropriations and ordered an army of 50,000
    men.

    Arkansas has for several days past been in arms on this frontier for
    the protection (of) citizens, and the neighboring Indian nations whose
    interests are identical with her own.

    I have news through my scouts that the U. S. troops have abandoned the
    forts in the Chickasaw country.

    Under my orders from the commander-in-chief and governor of Arkansas,
    I feel authorized to extend to you such military aid as will be
    required in the present juncture of affairs to occupy and hold the
    forts.

    I have appointed Col. A. H. Word, one of the State senators, and
    Captain Sparks, attached to this command, commissioners to treat and
    confer with you on this subject. These gentlemen are fully apprised of
    the nature of the powers intrusted to myself by the governor of this
    State, and are authorized to express to you my views of the subject
    under consideration. I ask, therefore, that you express to them your
    own wishes in the premises, and believe, my dear sir, that Arkansas
    cherishes the kindest regards for your people.

    I have the honor to subscribe myself, with sentiments of regard, your
    excellency's friend and servant,

        B. BURROUGHS, Brigadier-General, Commanding.[194]

The impudence and calm effrontery of this has its humorous side and would
seem even ridiculous were it not for the fact that we are bound to
remember that the Indians took it all so very seriously. It was true
enough, as Burroughs said, that the Federal troops had abandoned the
Indian country; but against whom were the forts to be held? Surely not
against the Federals. Furthermore, what need was there for Arkansas to
interest herself in the Chickasaw forts, since the Texan troops were
already in possession? Is it possible to suppose that Burroughs's scouts,
who had found out so much about the withdrawal of the Federal forces, had
not discovered the work of the Texans in contributing thereto? The
Chickasaws were particularly friendly to the secessionists and, in this
same month of May, passed, by means of their legislature, those eight
resolutions[195] in which they gave such strong expression to their
views, at the same time, however, giving the Southern States clearly to
understand that they knew the extent of their own rights and were