Cherokee Freedmen
The Cherokee Freedmen are individuals, formerly enslaved in the Cherokee Nation and freed in 1863, and their descendants. They have African ancestry, and many also have Cherokee ancestry. Today, descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen on the Dawes Rolls are eligible for citizenship within the Cherokee Nation.
During the early 19th century, some Cherokee and other Southeast Native American nations known as the Five Civilized Tribes held African-American slaves as property. Slavery was an important part of the Cherokee economy and culture; by 1860, Cherokee Nation members owned 2,511 slaves, largely taken from the Southeast thirty years before. This slave labor contributed to the redevelopment of Cherokee infrastructure. After the American Civil War, the Cherokee Freedmen were emancipated and allowed to become citizens of the Cherokee Nation in accordance with a reconstruction treaty made with the United States in 1866.
In the early 1980s, the Cherokee Nation administration amended citizenship rules to require direct descent from an ancestor listed on the "Cherokee By Blood" section of the Dawes Rolls. The change stripped descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen of citizenship and voting rights unless they satisfied this new criterion. As a result, there were several legal proceedings between the two parties from the late 20th century to August 2017.
On August 30, 2017, the U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the Freedmen descendants and the U.S. Department of the Interior, granting the Freedmen descendants full rights to citizenship in the Cherokee Nation. After Justice Shawna Baker of the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court published the opinion, Effect of Cherokee Nation v. Nash & Vann v. Zinke, CNSC-2017-07 in 2021, the Cherokee Nation's Supreme Court ruled to remove the words "by blood" from its constitution and other legal doctrines.
Terminology
"Freedmen" is one of the terms given to emancipated slaves and their descendants after slavery was abolished in the United States following the American Civil War. In this context, "Cherokee Freedmen" refers to the African American people who enslaved by Cherokee people before 1866. It includes the descendants of such former slaves, as well as those born in unions between free or enslaved African Americans and Cherokee Nation citizens, and the term "Cherokee Freedmen descendants" is also sometimes used to identify contemporary members of the group.Several Cherokee Freedmen descendants have continued to embrace this historical connection. Others, after having been excluded from the tribe for two decades in the late twentieth century and subject to a continuing citizenship struggle, have become ambivalent about their ties. They no longer think identifying as Cherokee is necessary to their personal identity.
History
Slavery among the Cherokee
Slavery was a component of Cherokee society prior to European colonization, as they frequently enslaved enemy captives taken during times of conflict with other Indigenous tribes. By their oral tradition, Cherokee people traditionally viewed slavery as the result of an individual's failure in warfare and as a temporary status, pending release or the slave's adoption into the tribe. During the late 17th and early 18th century, Carolinian settlers purchased or impressed Cherokees as slaves.From the late 1700s to the 1860s, the Five Civilized Tribes in the American Southeast began to adopt certain Euro-American customs. Some men acquired separate land and became planters, purchasing enslaved African Americans for laborers in field work, domestic service, and various trades. In the 1730s, the Cherokee signed a treaty with the British Empire to return runaway slaves to British colonists.
The 1809 census taken by Cherokee agent Colonel Return J. Meigs Sr. counted 583 "Negro slaves" held by Cherokee slaveowners. By 1835, that number increased to 1,592 slaves, with more than seven percent of Cherokee families owning slaves. This was a higher percentage than generally across the South, where about 5% of families owned slaves.
Cherokee slaveowners took their slaves with them on the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of Native Americans from their original lands to Indian Territory by the federal government. Of the Five Civilized Tribes removed to Indian Territory, the Cherokee were the largest tribe and held the most enslaved African Americans. Prominent Cherokee slaveowners included the families of Joseph Lynch, Joseph Vann, Major Ridge, Stand Watie, Elias Boudinot, and Principal Chief John Ross.
While slavery was less common among full-blood Cherokee, because these people tended to live in more isolated settlements away from European-American influence and trade, both full-blood and mixed-blood Cherokee became slaveowners. Among the notable examples of the former is Tarsekayahke, also known by the name "Shoe Boots". He participated in the 1793 raid on Morgan's Station, Montgomery County, Kentucky, the last Indian raid in the state. The raiders took as captive Clarinda Allington, a white adolescent girl, and she was adopted into a Cherokee family and assimilated. Shoe Boots later married her and they had children: William, Sarah and John. Shoe Boots fought for the Cherokee in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend during the Creek War.
At this time Shoe Boots held two African-American slaves, including Doll, who was about Clarinda's age. Clarinda left, taking their children with her. Afterward, Shoe Boots took Doll as a sexual partner or concubine. He fathered three children with her, whom he named as Elizabeth, Polly and John.
The Cherokee tribe had a matrilineal kinship system, by which inheritance and descent were passed on the mother's side; children were considered born into her family and clan. Since these mixed-race children were born to a slave, they inherited Doll's slave status. The Cherokee had adopted this element of slave law common among the slave states in the United States, known as partus sequitur ventrem. For the children to be fully accepted in the tribe, they would ordinarily have had to be adopted by a Cherokee woman and her clan. But on October 20, 1824, Shoe Boots petitioned the Cherokee National Council to grant emancipation for his three children and have them recognized as free Cherokee citizens. Shoe Boots stated in his petition,
These is the only children I have as Citizens of this Nation, and as the time I may be called to die is uncertain, My desire is to have them as free citizens of this nation. Knowing what property I may have, is to be divided amongst the Best of my friends, how can I think of them having bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh to be called their property, and this by my imprudent conduct, and for them and their offspring to suffer for generations yet unborn, is a thought too great a magnitude for me to remain silent any longer.
After consideration, his request was granted by the Cherokee National Council on November 6, 1824. That year the Council passed a law prohibiting marriage between Cherokee and slaves, or Cherokee and free Blacks. But, the following year in 1825, the Council passed a law giving automatic Cherokee citizenship to mixed-race children born to white women and their Cherokee husbands. Gradually more Cherokee men were marrying white women from outside the tribe. The Council wanted to provide a way for the children of these male leaders to be considered citizens of the tribe. Before this time, mixed-race children had generally been born to Cherokee women and white men, most often traders. Because of the matrilineal kinship system, these children were traditionally considered born to the mother's family and clan, and thus citizens of the tribe by birth.
While granting his request for emancipation of his children, the Council ordered Shoe Boots to cease his relationship with Doll. But he fathered two more boys with her, twin sons Lewis and William, before his death in 1829. Heirs of his estate later forced these two sons into slavery. His sisters inherited his twin sons as property, and they unsuccessfully petitioned the council to grant emancipation and citizenship to the twins.
The nature of enslavement in Cherokee society in the antebellum years was often similar to that in European-American slave society, with little difference between the two. The Cherokee instituted their own slave code and laws that discriminated against slaves and free blacks. Cherokee law barred intermarriage of Cherokee and blacks, whether the latter were enslaved or free. African Americans who aided slaves were to be punished with 100 lashes on the back. Cherokee society barred those of African descent from holding public office, bearing arms, voting, and owning property. It was illegal for anyone within the limits of the Cherokee Nation to teach blacks to read or write. This law was amended so that the punishment for non-Cherokee citizens teaching blacks was a request for removal from the Cherokee Nation by authorities. The tribe's 1839 Constitution banned "negro and mulatto" people from holding office.
After removal to Indian Territory with the Cherokee, enslaved African Americans initiated several revolts and escape attempts, attesting to their desire for freedom. In the Cherokee Slave Revolt of 1842, several African-American slaves in Indian Territory, including 25 held by Cherokee planter Joseph Vann, left their respective plantations near Webbers Falls, Indian Territory to escape to Mexico. The slaves were captured by a Cherokee militia under the command of Captain John Drew of the Cherokee Lighthorse near Fort Gibson. On December 2, 1842, the Cherokee National Council passed "An Act in regard to Free Negroes"; it banned all free blacks from the limits of the Cherokee Nation by January 1843, except those freed by Cherokee slaveowners. In 1846, an estimated 130–150 African slaves escaped from several plantations in Cherokee territory. Most of the slaves were captured in Seminole territory by a joint group of Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole slaveowners.