According to lore, on a hot day in June 1865, at the end of the Civil War, a group of Union soldiers on horseback rode into Oklahoma from Texas and convened groups of enslaved African Americans in clearings in the woods and on plantation fields. In the thick, dust-filled summer air, they told the gathering of African Americans that slavery was over. Oklahoma was vast, full of frontier towns, farms, and Indian settlements. More than five thousand African Americans lived in the territory in bondage. Despite what they may have been told, African Americans in Oklahoma would not be liberated until much later.
They had been enslaved not by white men but by the Indians of the Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes who ruled the region. The people of the five major tribes of Oklahoma fought with the Confederacy during the war and were slow to surrender to the Union even after General Robert E. Lee and the rest of the Confederacy’s soldiers laid down their weapons. Standhope Uwatie, a Cherokee Confederate brigadier general and commander of the Confederate Indian cavalry, was the last rebel commander to lay down arms on June 23, 1865. Even after that, the Indian rebels continued to fight for months; braves raided Union camps in Oklahoma every few weeks, and Indian slaveholders defied federal law and continued to hold African Americans as slaves. Their resistance was born out of their attachment to the institution of slavery and their hatred of the US government.
Indians in the southern states began enslaving African Americans as early as the eighteenth century, after they were introduced to the practice by white settlers. For some Indians, such as the Creek and the Pawnee, holding slaves had been a part of their culture before their first contact with Europeans; for the majority, however, their entanglement with slavery began when they became the first victims of it. In the colonies of Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama, Indians were held as slaves alongside African Americans. Later, as the practice of enslaving Indians declined in the early 1800s, members of the Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Chickasaw tribes began to show up at slave auctions to purchase trafficked African Americans. As they shifted from pelt hunting to farming as their main source of income, plantation slavery became normal in Indian communities. In the 1830s and ’40s, Indians were displaced from the South by President Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy. Federal troops removed tens of thousands of Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Indians, forcing them to relocate to Oklahoma. They traveled on foot, in stagecoaches, or on the backs of horses across the Mississippi, taking their slaves with them into the wilderness. At the end of the journey, they reached an undeveloped patch of land that the government called the Indian Territory. The Indians translated the name into Choctaw and called their new home Okla Humma, meaning “land of the red people.”
The area was also home to the thousands of African Americans who made the journey as slaves to the new region. On the journey, migrants battled heat waves and hurricanes. They fought outbreaks of whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, and cholera, all the while being given inadequate rations of food and water by the federal troops who chaperoned their removal from their homelands. The African American slaves who made the journey, sometimes in chains, were assigned the bulk of the manual labor and were often the last to receive a bite of food or sip of water. As a result, they had the highest mortality rate during the already deadly trip. For the Indians and African Americans who survived the march, it would come to be known among them as the Trail of Tears.
Three decades later, when the Civil War began, the five tribes of Oklahoma pledged allegiance to the Confederacy. They joined the rebels to defend their rights as slaveholders and exact revenge on the federal government. During the Civil War, the Confederacy failed to send weapons or reinforcements to Oklahoma. As a result, the Indian rebels in Oklahoma were massacred when they had to do battle with Union fighters. Nonetheless, at the war’s end, they refused to surrender. Late in 1865, under threat of all-out war, the leaders of each tribe were summoned to Reconstruction conferences in Arkansas and Washington, D.C., to negotiate their terms of surrender. First, the government demanded that the surrendering tribes sign a new peace treaty with the US government. Second, they were to emancipate their slaves and give them tribal rights. Last, they were to cede roughly a quarter of their land as reparations to the federal government for having joined the Confederacy.
The terms of the surrender of the Indians in Oklahoma brought jubilation and hope to the African Americans who had been their slaves. Slowly, at the end of 1865, more than five thousand enslaved African Americans in the territory were set free. Upon Emancipation, they began to advocate that the confiscated Indian land be broken up into 40- or 160-acre parcels and given to them to start farms. Some even dreamed that the ceded Indian territory could be turned into an all-black state. All over the country emancipated African Americans and their allies, the Union Army and the Radical Republicans in Congress, advocated that African Americans be given 40 acres of land, perhaps with a mule and a plow.
In Oklahoma, the realization of those hopes felt attainable. African Americans dreamed they could build a promised land on the old Indian lands, a place of their own where they could achieve economic independence as self-employed farmers. In anticipation, hundreds of African American families took up residence on the Indian lands, living in shantytowns made up of old slave quarters and canvas tents.
Almost as soon as they began squatting on the ceded Indian land, bands of Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians with war paint smeared on their cheeks and carrying whips began riding into the encampments on random nights, raiding and pillaging homes. They looted and smashed and dragged black men out of their homes to publicly whip or lynch them as women and children watched. Despite those intimidations, the dreamers in Oklahoma remained, hoping that any day the government would give them the right to petition to be given the land.
In 1866, after the Indian tribes of Oklahoma finalized their surrender with a transfer of more than 5 million acres in the center of the Indian Territory to the federal government, African Americans began to petition the Bureau of Land Management for parcels of land. Under the Homestead Act passed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, Americans could petition the government for an allotment of publicly held lands. Soon after the first inquiries were received, the Bureau of Land Management rejected them announcing that the lands had already been earmarked as a resettlement territory for a new group of Indians who were being removed from the Midwest on the second Trail of Tears. Defeated, some African Americans stayed and fought to be accepted as tribesmen by the Indians who had once held them as slaves; others left Oklahoma altogether to find their way elsewhere in the emancipated world. There would be no 40 acres for them; there would be no promised land. Not yet.