Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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While the practice was limited in the American Southwest,⁹ the Indians of “cotton culture” country held the most enslaved blacks. This was especially true for the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” of the Southeast, especially the Cherokees who by 1809 held 600 enslaved blacks, a number that grew to 21,000 in 1860. The Cherokee constitution, written by the Indians themselves, prohibited slaves and their descendants (including mixed-races) from owning property. When the Indian Removal Act was enforced during the 1830s, the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles took their slaves (6% of the aggregate population, or 5,000 black slaves) with them to Indian Territory (today’s Oklahoma), and later supported the Confederate cause during the Civil War.¹⁰

By the middle of the nineteenth century Indian slavery in the Southwest was a mix of three distinct traditions. The first, of course, was the kin-ordered system of the Native Americans themselves. The second was an amalgam of Indian and Spanish practices, and was not unlike the kin-based slave societies of Africa. This borderland “slave system” paralleled the African situation in several ways, including war captives, the dominance of women and children as slaves, the absence of plantations, the practice of pawnage, the role of kinship and related customs (including, for the Spanish, compadrazgo sanctified by the Church, and other kinds of social interchange that extended family relations such as intermarriage, concubinage, and miscegenation), and the agency of a “conquest” state that curtailed or promoted slavery.¹¹