William P. Ross, John Ross’s nephew, was elected twice as principal chief of the Western Cherokees. The first editor of the newspaper Cherokee Advocate, he described the devastating effects of the Civil War in 1864:
Everything has been much changed by the destroying hand of War…. [B]ut few men remain at their homes…. [N]early all the farms are growing up in bushes and briars, houses abandoned or burnt…. [A] great and melancholy change … has come over our once prosperous and beautiful country…. [L]ivestock of all kinds has become very scarce…. We have not a horse, cow or hog left that I know of…. [S]ome few have a yoke of oxen or a mule…. [There has been a] great increase in the number of wild animals. The wolves howl dismally over the land and the panther’s scream is often heard.1
As a result of wartime disruptions, Cherokee women had to assume new responsibilities and greater burdens. They suffered from refugee status and violence in the form of rape, raids, and robberies. The Civil War intensified class, political, and racial divisions within the nation. At the same time, it emphasized the role of men as warriors and elevated the role of women as providers and cultivators of the earth.2
The Cherokees were drawn into the war because of their geographical location and because many of them owned slaves. Loyalty to either side was problematic for them. The Southern states had dispossessed them of their homeland in the East, and the federal government had enforced their removal, withdrawn its troops from the territory, and suspended annuity payments. Bitterness between the Ridge and Ross factions grew out of the removal period when the Ridge family endorsed the Treaty of New Echota, which ceded Cherokee land in the Southeast. The Ross faction steadfastly opposed removal. The turmoil continued into the Civil War, with loyalties divided between the North and the South.
John Ross, the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation for thirty-eight years, sought to maintain neutrality when the Civil War broke out. Albert Pike, who supported the Confederate side, wrote prophetically to Colonel John Drew on July 14, 1862, warning the Cherokees of the probable results of Union loyalty: “Surely the Cherokees are sagacious enough to know that soft as the paw of the panther may be, its treacherous nature will not long allow it to keep its claws concealed. The northern states will never forgive you. They may profess that until the war is over; but if they hold possession of your country they will punish you by parceling out your lands; and licking their lips they will think they have done God good service.”3
The Union did not offer any support or protection when Confederate troops surrounded the Cherokee Nation. Ross was forced to abandon neutrality. On October 7, 1861, the council passed resolutions supporting a treaty with the Confederacy. Stand Watie and John Drew recruited troops for the South. When Union forces moved into Tahlequah in the spring of 1862, they arrested Ross and accompanied him to Washington in order to confer with Abraham Lincoln. In early 1863, Ross’s faction declared its allegiance to the Union, freed its slaves, and repudiated the alliance with the Confederacy. The Cherokee Nation was divided in two until the end of the war because Watie and his followers refused to accept this position.4
Cherokee and black women interacted with each other in complex ways before and throughout the Civil War. Prior to their emancipation, female slaves owned by the Cherokees did the work previously allotted to Cherokee women. They were instrumental in enabling a small class of acculturated women to pursue gentility and leisure. Thus, the relationship between black women and Cherokee women played a critical role in shaping gender distinctions. Elite Cherokees came to associate patriarchal gender roles with being civilized.5
Most Cherokee women expressed no support for the ideals of either the Union or the Confederacy. They hated the war, wanted it to end, and often urged their husbands and sons to return home. They spent the duration of the war at home with their families or as refugees, barely managing to survive. During the war, Cherokee women had to raise crops; spin, weave, and sew if they were to have any clothes; haul wood and supplies; care for the sick; and bury the dead. The women showed courage and strength as they faced the terror of destruction of their homes and property, robberies, and violence. Some of them relied on their religious faith to sustain them.
After the horrors of the war, the Western Cherokee Nation once again began to rebuild its institutions of government and education. Because many Cherokees had supported the South, the United States government punished the entire nation during Reconstruction. It demanded railroad access through Indian Territory, insisted that the Indian nations give citizenship and land to their freed slaves, and thwarted their sale of neutral lands and the Cherokee Outlet (a piece of land in Indian Territory owned by the Cherokees and leased for cattle grazing). The government stalled payments owed to the tribe and refused to remove white intruders. By the late nineteenth century, the Cherokee Nation became destabilized and faced possible loss of sovereignty.6
More than one-third of adult Cherokee women were widows at the close of the Civil War, and a quarter of Cherokee children (twelve hundred total) were orphans. For these survivors, the cessation of hostilities left deep scars. The loss of so many husbands and fathers was a devastating blow psychologically, economically, and politically. Widows had to live in the midst of a shattered nation that had lost four thousand people. Many husbands who returned from the war were disabled or seriously wounded.7 The “panther’s scream” was often heard.
The following selections present the voices of Cherokee women on both sides of the Civil War. The letters, diary, and oral histories reveal their courage and strength during that tumultuous time.
1 Mary Elizabeth Good, editor, “The Diary of Hannah Hicks,” American Scene 13, no. 3 (1972), editor’s epilogue, 22.
2 William McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokees’ Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 74.
3 Albert Pike to Colonel John Drew, July 14, 1862, Grant Foreman Collection, Box 6, 83–229, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City, Okla.
4 Edward Everett Dale and Gaston Litton, editors, Cherokee Cavaliers: Forty Years of Cherokee History As Told in the Correspondence of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot Family (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), xx, xxi; Alvin M. Josephy Jr., The Civil War in the American West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 319, 322.
5 Theda Perdue, “Southern Indians and the Cult of True Womanhood,” in The Web of Southern Social Relations: Women, Family and Education, edited by Walter I. Fraser, R. Frank Saunders Jr., and Jon I. Wakelyn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 35–51.
6 See Carolyn Ross Johnston, “The ‘Panther’s Scream Is Often Heard’: Cherokee Women in Indian Territory during the Civil War,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 78, no. 1, edited by Mary Ann Blochowiak (2000): 84–107; Mary Jane Warde, “Now the Wolf Has Come: The Civilian War in the Indian Territory,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 71, no. 1 (1993): 69–87.
7 Morris L. Wardell, A Political History of the Cherokee Nation, 1838–1907 (1938; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), 175; McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears, 220.