From 1750 until the start of the Civil War, there were two groups of Native Americans, particularly those in the southeast, when it came down to the views on black slaves: the ones who acted like abolitionists and the ones who wanted to assimilate to southern white culture. Some Indians helped slaves escape, but some tracked them down to return to their plantations. Some married free and enslaved blacks and some sold them to whites.
But still many Native Americans chose to actually be slaveholders. By 1824 the Cherokee held about 1,277 slaves; by 1860 the Choctaw and the Chickasaw had more than 5,000. When President Andrew Jackson forced the southeastern Indians to move to the Oklahoma Territory (Trail of Tears), as many as 15,000 black slaves marched with them. And with all this, no evidence exists that suggests that blacks ever owned Indian slaves.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Native Americans and black slaves
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1 comments:
this interested me- My dad's grandmother was indian and lived near Baton Rouge. EACH of his family members died before he was 15 and we don't even have names for 99% of them, but he has always mentioned that he felt he had ancestors who were either Indians used as slaves or Indians who married black slaves. He is white, and in the pic we have of his mother and father-they are white--I'm not sure how to find out any of that info and track back, but it's always interested me. We recently went to Baton Rouge and there was a whole grave yard filled with stones bearing his last name tho---that was shocking and I think- maybe some kind of first clue I could start with one day.....
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