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ABSTRACT
This paper explores how the Mississippi Choctaws engaged state citizenship in the years immediately following removal. I challenge the standard narrative of Choctaws’ relationships with the Mississippi legal system as one in which they were primarily victimized by unscrupulous lawyers and state officials. I argue instead that Choctaws used their new status as citizens to fight back against dispossession. I also examine how ideals of masculinity and class conflicts shaped interpretations of rights and obligations between Indians and whites.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Katherine M. B. Osburn is an Ethnohistorian focusing on the intersections between gender, race, identity, and political activism. Her first monograph, Southern Ute Women: Autonomy and Assimilation on the Reservation, 1885-1934, is in its second edition. Her most recent monograph, Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi: Race, Class, and Nation Building in the Jim Crow South, 1830-1977, examines Choctaw identity formation and performance in their campaign for tribal rebirth in the post-Removal South. She is currently working on a history of Indian activism in Arizona with an emphasis on their relationships with their elected officials. She is Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University.
Notes
* This paper is adapted from my monograph Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi: Race, Class, and Nation Building in the Jim Crow South, 1830–1977 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014).
1. House Committee on Indian Affairs, “Land Claims &c. Under 14th Article Choctaw Treaty, May 11, 1836,” H R. Rep. 663, 24th Cong., 1st Sess., 41, 59.
2. Halbert, “Life of Little Leader or Hopaii Iskitimi.” An unpaginated notebook in The Papers of Henry S. Halbert, Alabama Department of History and Archives, Montgomery, Alabama; hereafter cited as “Life of Little Leader.” There are two notebooks on this topic, one in Box 4, Folder 4, and the other in Folder 5 in the same box. The notebook in Folder 4 is an earlier draft. The one in Folder 5 is the later document and is more complete. That is the one used in this work.
3. Halbert, “Life of Little Leader.”
4. This was certainly the view of the Mississippi legislature at the time. See “Memorial of the Legislature of the State of Mississippi upon the Subject of Lands Acquired by Treaty from the Choctaw Nation of Indians,” H. Doc. 75, 22nd Cong. 1st Sess., Microfiche 217 for a description of how speculators were allegedly manipulating Choctaw land claims for their own purposes. Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks, 53–72, also portrays the Choctaws primarily as victims of speculators as does Satz, “The Mississippi Choctaw,” 8–9.
5. The literature on the legal status of Indians in the Revolutionary and Early National periods of United States history is voluminous, but Douglas Bradburn’s study of political inclusion and exclusion in the citizenship debates of the Revolutionary era, The Citizenship Revolution, provides a broader context for understanding the discussions of citizenship for racial and ethnic minorities and women in this period. For an excellent analysis of Indian citizenship and federalism, see Rosen, American Indians and State Law. The U.S. Constitution is found at: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/art1.asp (accessed January 26, 2015). For the Naturalization Act of 1790, see http://law.justia.com/constitution/us/article-1/35-naturalization-and-citizenship.html (accessed January 26, 2015). Matthew Frye Jacobson argues for the centrality of race in debates over citizenship and delineates how ethnic minorities “became white” as their position on the ladder of social hierarchy shifted with changing historical circumstances. Jacobson’s documentation of the malleability of race as a legal construct is applicable to the Choctaws as well. See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color.
6. For a description of the civilization program among the Choctaws, see Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 66–8.
7. Marshall quoted in Rosen, American Indians and State Law, 13. The case itself revolved around two competing claims to land ceded by the Illinois and Piankeshaw nations in the late eighteenth century. Marshall ruled that the Indians could not grant land to individuals but only to the federal government because: “The title of land which has been discovered and conquered belongs entirely to the conquering nation, subject only to the right of those natives present to occupy the land.” http://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/property/property-law-keyed-to-cribbet/role-of-property-in-society/johnson-v-mcintosh/ (accessed July 5, 2015). Having deprived Indian nations of their titles to their lands, Marshall sanctioned conquest and declared Indian sovereignty a thing of the past. He would later partially reverse this ruling in Worcester v Georgia (1832) when he declared Indigenous peoples to be “domestic dependent nations.” For a superb collection of essays on Indigenous sovereignty by Native scholars, see Joanne Barker’s edited collection Sovereignty Matters.
8. For insightful analysis concerning Indian citizenship, see Rosen, American Indians and State Law, 157 and Hoxie, “What was Taney Thinking?”.
9. Settler colonialism is distinct from extractive colonialism in that, rather than simply exploiting natural resources using Indigenous labor, it seeks to replace the culture and peoples of the colonized lands with the culture and peoples of the colonizers. Thus, it has a certain “logic of elimination” that devises apologia for dispossession generally based on perceived “savage” characteristics of Indigenous peoples. For an overview of settler colonialism, see Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” For the historiography of the idea of settler colonialism, see Veracini, “‘Settler Colonialism’: Career of a Concept.”
10. As noted in Note 7, European settlers claimed the Americas by the “Doctrine of Discovery,” a western legal construct sanctioning the dispossession of non-Christian peoples by Christian monarchs who “discover” their lands. This ideology was enshrined in law in Johnson v M’Intosh (1823). For a history and legal analysis of the Doctrine, see Miller et al., Discovering Indigenous Lands. For how this doctrine played out in legal battles over Indian lands in the Native South, see Garrison, The Legal Ideology of Removal. Historian Jamey Carson has argued that the term “Indian removal” sanitizes what was essential ethnic cleansing. Carson, “The Obituary of Nations.”
11. Andrew Jackson to John McKee, Choctaw Agent, April 22, 1819. In 2 American State Papers: Indian Affairs 229 (1832), 229.
12. Preamble to the Treaty of Doak’s Stand, A Treaty with the Choctaw, 1820, Article Four, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/Vol2/treaties/cho0191.htm (accessed July 31, 2015).
13. For the market revolution among the Choctaws, see Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 70–85.
14. A Treaty with the Choctaw, 1820, Article Four, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/Vol2/treaties/cho0191.htm (accessed January 26, 2015).
15. Treaty of Washington City, 1825. http://s3.amazonaws.com/choctaw-msldigital/assets/155/1825_Treaty_of_Washington_City_original.pdf (accessed July 31, 2015).
16. Journal of the State of Mississippi at Their Thirtieth Session, 5; Stuart, A Sketch of the Cherokee and Choctaw Indians, 24–5.
17. For a detailed explanation of these tensions, see Garrison, The Legal Ideology of Removal.
18. The head of a family could receive 640 acres, an additional 320 acres for every unmarried child over age 10, and 160 acres for children under 10. The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, Article 14, Charles Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 222; Journal of the Proceedings at the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, cited in S. Doc. 512, 21st Cong., 1st Sess., 256–61. The treaty itself was not signed by the full Tribal Council, which rejected it. Rather, federal negotiators gathered the few mingoes who remained after negotiations had broken down and pressured them into signing. For an analysis of the treaty negotiations, see Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 120–5.
19. The term “mixed-blood” is problematic. Like its counterpoint, “full-blood,” it is a racial category implying that blood has meaning as a component of analysis. Recent research on genetics has discounted this idea. Nonetheless, for the historical actors in this drama, the notion of blood was meaningful. The term in this study is meant to reflect this historical construction and not to imply anything more. For an analysis of Indian views of mixed ancestry in the antebellum period, see Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians.
20. Journal of the Proceedings at the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, 256–61.
21. For statements linking Indian blood and removal, see Journal of the Proceedings at the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, 256–61; Wells, “The Role of Mixed Bloods in Mississippi Choctaw History,” 50–2.
22. Greenwood LeFlore and David Folsom to Andrew Jackson, March 18, 1830, quoted in Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 118.
23. The Constitution of 1832, Article VII, Sect. 18, Mississippi History Now, An Online Publication of The Mississippi Historical Society http://mshistory.k12.ms.us/articles/101/the-mississippi-constitution-of-1832 (accessed August 31, 2011).
24. For a detailed analysis of these communities, see Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi.
25. Testimony of William E. Richardson, Attorney for Certain Mississippi Choctaws, and P. J. Hurley, Attorney for the Oklahoma Choctaws. In House Committee on Indian Affairs, 63rd Cong, 2nd Sess.; Hearings on Enrollment in the Five Civilized Tribes; April 1, 2, 14, 16; May 14; June 2, 4, 9, 11, 13; August 4–7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 24–27, 1913; Microfiche-Group 1A; SUDOC: Y4.In2/1:F58/3, pp. 29–30; 36.
26. Henry S. Halbert, “The Introduction of Christianity and Education among the Choctaws.” Chapter Twelve of an unpublished manuscript, History of the Choctaw Indians East of the Mississippi, 213. The Papers of Henry S. Halbert, Box 4, Folder 2. Hereafter cited as History of the Choctaw Indians.
27. Halbert, History of the Choctaw Indians, 214.
28. Davis, Recollections of Mississippi and Mississippians, 60.
29. Halbert, “Life of Little Leader.”
30. Davis, Recollections, 62.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Halbert, “Life of Little Leader”; Davis, Recollections, 61–2.
34. “Petition Sent to the Governor of the State of Mississippi, December 1, 1837,” typescript in the WPA files, WPA interviews for Kemper County, Folder: History, Record Group 60, Series 447, Box 10731, Mississippi Department of Archives and Records, Jackson, Mississippi.
35. “Petition Sent to the Governor of Mississippi.”
36. “Petition Sent to the Governor of Mississippi.”
37. Davis, Recollections, 61–2.
38. Halbert’s two manuscripts give different dates for Little Leader’s death. The manuscript in Folder 4 says 1847 while the one in Folder 5 says 1851.
39. Unfortunately, records of this trial were destroyed when the Kemper County Courthouse burned in 1912. Kemper County did not have a newspaper at the time of the trial and perusal of the state’s other newspapers, the Mississippian and the Natchez Courier and Journal, yielded no reports of the proceedings.
40. “Land Claims &c. Under 14th Article Choctaw Treaty,” 54.
41. The term “republicanism” is slippery, and historians have debated the degree to which it is a coherent ideology and where and how it has manifested itself in American history. I mean the term here to refer to an ideology of work and personal worth that celebrated the freedom of the individual producer (in this case, farmers) and linked personal and political independence with control of the means of production and expansive democracy. For a delightful historiographical overview of the debates over the meaning of the term republicanism, see Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept.” For historical studies of republicanism, see Watson, Liberty and Power; Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism; Sellers, The Market Revolution; and McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds.
42. “Memorial of the Legislature of the State of Mississippi upon the Subject of Lands Acquired by Treaty from the Choctaw Nation of Indians.” H. Doc. 75, 22nd Cong., 1st Sess., Microfiche 217. Hereafter cited as Mississippi Memorial.
43. The best analysis of the legal conflicts over Choctaw lands and the role that national and local party politics played in this battle is Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks.
44. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi, 1–37.
45. Ibid., 174.
46. For the Mississippi military tradition in the antebellum period, see Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi. For a broader analysis of masculinity and honor in the South, see the essays in Southern Manhood, edited by Friend and Glover.
47. Novak, “The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in 19th Century America.”
48. For an excellent analysis of how this ideology affected Indians’ rights to state citizenship, see Rosen, American Indians and State Law, 33–6.
49. Halbert, “Sketch of Little Leader.”
50. Ibid. For Choctaw redistributive practices, see Carson, Searching for the Bright Path.
51. “Application for Indemnity, for Being Deprived by Settlers of Reservations of the Choctaw Indians, February 1, 1836,” 1, H. Doc.1415, 24th Cong., 2nd Sess. Hereafter cited as Application for Indemnity. For an analysis of the complexities of state citizenship for Indians, see Deloria and Wilkins, Tribes, Treaties, and Congressional Tribulations and Rosen, American Indians and State Law.
52. “Application for Indemnity,” 2–3.
53. “Message of the President of the United States Transmitting the Correspondence in Relation to the Proceedings and Conduct of the Choctaw Commission under the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, January 30, 1844.” S. Doc. 168, 28th Cong., 1st Sess., Microfiche 433, Exhibit A, “Copy of Power of Attorney from Indians to Gwinn … Left with Col. Cobb.” Hereafter referred to as, President’s Report on the Choctaw Commission.
54. “Copy of Power of Attorney from Indians to Gwinn … Left with Col. Cobb.” President’s Report on the Choctaw Commission, 118–21.
55. “Testimony of Col. Samuel Cobb, September 12, 1843,” President’s Report on the Choctaw Commission, 144.
56. The 1836 commission noted Cobb’s success as a claimant in H.R. 663, 15–16. He may also have been a speculator in Choctaw lands. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries, 168.
57. Claiborne to Crawford, May 8, 1843, 38–40, S. Doc. 168.
58. Claiborne, Mississippi as a Province, Territory, and State. vol. I, 512. Choctaw historian Bob Ferguson notes that the use of the pipe indicates “sincere intentions.” See http://www.choctaw.org/History/Treaties/treaty9.html (accessed July 1, 2009).
59. For Indian diplomacy and treaty language, see Williams, Linking Arms Together.
60. Cobb quoted in Claiborne, Mississippi as a Province, Territory, and State, Vol. I, 512–13. The original speech is in Niles Weekly Register, 64 (April 29, 1843), 131–2. The accuracy of the entire speech is open to question. Claiborne may have embellished Cobb’s oratory somewhat. Nonetheless, I believe he captured the intent of the speech, which was consistent with what we know about diplomatic language from research on Indian treaty language and protocol. This speech became an important rhetorical tool for the Choctaws over the long struggle for tribal rebirth.
61. Cobb quoted in Claiborne, 513.
62. Halbert, History of the Choctaw Indians, 214–15.
63. Testimony of Samuel Cobb, in S. Doc. 168, 144–6. Claiborne also discusses these charges: J. F. H. Claiborne to Hon. T. Hartley Crawford, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, November 21, 1843; “Statement to the Proceedings of the Board of Choctaw Commissioners, November 30, 1843,” both on pages 11–12, in The Papers of J.F.H. Claiborne, Microfilm Reel One, vol. 2: 1841–54, Manuscripts Division. Library of Congress.
64. Gonzales, “Flush Times, Depression, War, and Compromise,” 284.
65. For the more positive view of Choctaws, see “Petition of a Number of Citizens of Mississippi Praying Congress to Institute into the Claims of Choctaw Indians to Reservations under the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, January 21, 1837,” S. Doc. 91, 24th Cong., 2nd Sess., 2. For the negative interpretations, see Removal and Subsistence of the Choctaw Indians, 28th Cong., 2nd Sess., February 17, 1845, S. Doc. 86, 32.
66. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi, 17–37. For first-hand accounts of the attempts to carve a “civilization” out of the wilderness in the early years of statehood, see Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi. This book is available online from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill library at: http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/baldwin/title.html.
67. Article 14 stipulated that Choctaw citizenship was contingent on a five-year residence on their allotments. Little Leader and Samuel Cobb certainly met this requirement. The state constitution granted citizenship to Indians subject to the whims of the Mississippi legislature, but there is no record of either man applying to the legislature to become Mississippians.
68. O’Brien, “Trying to Look Like Men,” 53–6, quotation on page 53.