Western Front
See also: Oklahoma in the American Civil WarIn the west, the Cherokees blamed the federal government and former United States President Andrew Jackson for the Trail of Tears. Also, they had adopted Southern ways before their removal from their Appalachia home, including the practice of owning blacks as slaves. So, the western Cherokee were already sympathetic towards the South when in 1860 William Seward, campaigning on behalf of Abraham Lincoln, said that Lincoln would open the Indian Territory for white settlement.
Chief of the Cherokee John Ross was adamant that the Union was not dissolved. However, another leader of the Cherokee, Stand Watie, was eager to join the Confederate cause, and on June 1, 1861, began recruiting for an army to assist the Southern cause. Full-blooded Cherokees tended to support Ross (who was actually 7/8 Scottish) while the mixed-blooded Cherokee supported the 3/4 Cherokee Stand Watie. Stand Watie in 1862 was elected Chief of the Southern Cherokee Nation.
For the duration of the war, a series of small battles were waged by Cherokees in the Indian Territory. Stand Watie officially became the last Confederate general to end fighting on June 25, 1865 at Fort Towson, in the southeast portion of the Indian Territory. The terms of the armistice allowed Watie and his command, the First Indian Brigade of the Army of the Trans-Mississippi, to demobilize rather than surrender and go home with their arms.
Read more about this topic: Cherokee In The American Civil War
Famous quotes containing the words western and/or front:
“All right, so there he is, our representative to the world, Mr. Western Civilization, in codpiece and pantyhose up there on the boards, firing away at the rapt groundlings with his blank verses, not less of a word-slinger and spellbinder than the Bard himself and therefore not to be considered too curiously on such matters as relevance, coherence, consistency, propriety, sanity, common decency.”
—Marvin Mudrick (1921–1986)
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)