Greenwood LeFlore - Removal or U.S. Citizenship

Removal or U.S. Citizenship

Despite being recognized as one of the "Five Civilized Tribes", the Choctaw were under pressure from encroaching European-American settlers. The settlers kept entering the Choctaw Nation lands in great numbers. The US government wanted to remove the Choctaw to lands west of the Mississippi River.

With the election of Andrew Jackson as president in 1828, who supported Indian removal, many of the Choctaw recognized that removal was inevitable. They had concluded they could not afford armed resistance. After passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the chiefs of the western and eastern districts resigned, and on March 15, 1830, the council elected LeFlore as principal chief, the first time that power had been so centralized among the Choctaw. He drafted a treaty which he sent to Washington, to try to secure the best terms for the Choctaw.

United States representatives came out to the Choctaw for a treaty council, where LeFlore used his formidable personal political capital and position as head of a unified tribe to secure the largest and most desirable areas of what would later be called Indian Territory. In addition, he believed that Article XIV would be honored and allow the Choctaw to keep some reserves in Mississippi. He regarded removal as inevitable, given his assessment of the politics and the sheer numbers of the growing European-American population.

The treaty included provisions allowing those Choctaw who chose to do so, to remain in Mississippi and become a citizen of the United States.

"ART. XIV. Each Choctaw head of a family being desirous to remain and become a citizen of the States, shall be permitted to do so, by signifying his intention to the Agent within six months from the ratification of this Treaty, and he or she shall thereupon be entitled to a reservation of one section of six hundred and forty acres of land, to be bounded by sectional lines of survey; in like manner shall be entitled to one half that quantity for each unmarried child which is living with him over ten years of age; and a quarter section to such child as may be under 10 years of age, to adjoin the location of the parent. If they reside upon said lands intending to become citizens of the States for five years after the ratification of this Treaty, in that case a grant in fee simple shall issue; said reservation shall include the present improvement of the head of the family, or a portion of it. Persons who claim under this article shall not lose the privilege of a Choctaw citizen, but if they ever remove are not to be entitled to any portion of the Choctaw annuity." According to the historian James Taylor Carson, the US Indian agent, William Ward, "refused to enroll the Choctaw claimants' reserves" in Mississippi, which undermined LeFlore's objectives for the treaty and led him to consider it a failure.

LeFlore's accomplishments in unifying and strengthening the Choctaw people are still honored. as the historian James Taylor Carson writes, "He was a Choctaw nationalist who sought to carve out a new and powerful nation for his people within the Cotton Kingdom of the Old South." His pragmatic approach to their removal from ancestral lands has been controversial.

Some Choctaw at the time believed that LeFlore had let them down and could have refused removal. Mushulatubbee, who had resigned, took back his office as chief of the western division, and rejected many of the civilizing measures which the national council had ordered during the previous two years. The Western Division council led a movement to depose LeFlore, and they elected his nephew George Washington Harkins in his place.

Jackson and other American leaders at the time had generally low opinions of mixed-race leaders, related more to their own ideas of race than an ability to appraise the Native American leaders. Carson believes that such negative opinions have affected the writing of historians for decades and their assessments of men such as LeFlore. He considers LeFlore and leaders like him to have been a new Creole generation, raised as Choctaw but absorbing what they could of the changing world to make a place for their peoples.

In the event, the Choctaw were awarded the largest territory of any removed tribe. It was located in the fertile, forested southeast corner of what is now Oklahoma. LeFlore did receive a grant of land in Mississippi, for 1,000 acres (4 km²) of land (his grant by the treaty, including allowances for unmarried children living with him.)