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:
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“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)
“... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“To the cry of ‘follow Mormons and prairie dogs and find good land,’ Civil War veterans flocked into Nebraska, joining a vast stampede of unemployed workers, tenant farmers, and European immigrants.”
—For the State of Nebraska, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)