Civil War
At the beginning of the Civil War, Indian Territory had been essentially reduced to the boundaries of the future State of Oklahoma, and the primary residents of the Territory were members of the Five Civilized Tribes plus a number of Plains tribes that had been relocated to the western part of Indian Territory on land leased from the Five Civilized Tribes. In 1861 the US abandoned Fort Washita, leaving the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations defenseless against the Plains tribes. Later the same year the Confederate States of America signed a Treaty with Choctaws and Chickasaws. Ultimately, all of the Five Civilized Tribes, as well as several other tribes that had been relocated to the area, signed treaties of friendship with the Confederacy.
During the Civil War, Congress gave the President the authority to, if a tribe was "in a state of actual hostility to the government of the United States... and, by proclamation, to declare all treaties with such tribe to be abrogated by such tribe"(25 USC Sec. 72).
Prior to the Civil War, the Pottawatomie Massacre (May 24–25, 1856) was one of the many bloody episodes in Kansas preceding which came to be known collectively as Bleeding Kansas.
Members of the Five Civilized Tribes, and others who had relocated to the Oklahoma section of Indian Territory, fought primarily on the side of the Confederacy during the American Civil War in Indian territory. Following the Battle of Doaksville, Brigadier General Stand Watie, a Confederate commander of the Cherokee Nation, became the last Confederate general to surrender in the American Civil War, on 23 June 1865. The Reconstruction Treaties signed at the end of the Civil War fundamentally changed the relationship between the tribes and the US Government, and the Indian Territory shrank to about 1/2 its former size.
Read more about this topic: Indian Territory
Famous quotes related to civil war:
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
Of the expropriated mycologist.”
—Derek Mahon (b. 1941)
“Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)