The Freedmen and Chickasaw Citizenship

In 1837, a treaty was entered upon between the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations and the U.S. Government. Although the Choctaw had previously removed to Indian Territory, the Chickasaw had not. Now the white settlers were moving into Alabama and Mississippi. The settlers wanted to move into the Chickasaw land and the government wanted the Chickasaws moved west.

In this treaty, the Chickasaws were given the right to live in the Choctaw Nation anywhere they wanted. This nation was the southern half of Oklahoma south of the Canadian River encompassing the southern half of this state.

The Chickasaws were also forced to pay the Choctaws a staggering sum of $530,000 for the right to live in the new Choctaw Nation. This amount would be more than $80,000,000 in today's money.

It has not come to my attention of any other tribe that was forced to give up their land in the Southeast and pay for their new land in the West at the same time.

Now, history is a little bit different than the commonly held beliefs of the Trail of Tears. In fact the Chickasaws could remain in their homes and not move West if they preferred. All they had to do was declare themselves U.S. citizens and dissolve any and all ties to their tribal rights.  They would be allotted 160 acres in their homeland.

Who among us would want to divorce our mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, never to see them again and forever give up the right to be a member of the family? This is what the government offered. Most chose to move for obvious reasons.

Although the Chickasaw people were now living in the Choctaw Nation, in 1840, they had no defined borders, no capitol and no legislature. They were an autonomous people in a foreign land and they were slowly being absorbed into the Choctaws both culturally and politically.

In 1855 the Chickasaws entered into another treaty with the Choctaws to set up an independent nation with defined borders. The Choctaw were pretty smart about this arrangement. The dreaded Comanches and Kiowas were in the western half of Oklahoma. The Choctaw gave the middle one-third of the Nation to the Chickasaws. This put a 200-mile buffer zone between the Choctaws and the Comanches.

A new nation was formed, a constitution written and a governor elected. The new nation prospered through the hard work and industrious nature of its people. The Chickasaw became the wealthiest among the five civilized tribes.

As the land was held in common by the tribe, a citizen could farm or ranch as much land as he could handle. As the people prospered they acquired more slaves to work the land and prospered even more.

A commonly held idea is that the Emancipation Proclamation outlawed slavery in this country. A careful reading however shows that this order freed only the slaves in the Southern states and counties that were still under Confederate control. The slaves in the rest of the country were not necessarily freed by this act. Slavery was still legal and practiced, in the West, after the Civil War.

In 1866, the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations, as well as many other Indian tribes, entered into yet another treaty with the U.S. Government. This treaty very nearly destroyed the two tribes after the civil war. The treaty was very lengthy, complicated and contrived.

The C & C Nations were independent nations and had to be dealt with as any sovereign nation, by treaty. One of the articles in this treaty stated that the C & C Nations would give each ex-slave forty acres and grant full voting citizenship to the slaves as free and equal members of the respective tribes.

The Chickasaws were not only the wealthiest but also the smallest in population among the Five Nations. The other four tribes eventually granted citizenship to their ex-slaves. The Chickasaws had a much different problem.

Upon a quick head count by the Chickasaw government, it was determined that there were as many as 10,000 ex-slaves and descendents. One of the rubbing points of the Government's position was that all the offspring of ex-slaves would also be eligible for allotments and citizenship. This would mean that all children of freedmen would be eligible for benefits even if they were born years after the Treaty of 1866 and were never born into slavery. The ex-slave and descendent population could have grown exponentially - forever. The population of the Chickasaws numbered about 6,000 members. One can immediately see a very serious problem had arisen.

If full citizenship was granted with full suffrage rights, one can readily see that the Chickasaw tribe would immediately become an African tribe and the Chickasaws would go into a serious minority in their own tribe.

This brings us back to the Treaty of 1866 again. Another article gave the land in the western part of the C & C Nations west of the 98th parallel to the U.S. government as a reservation for the dreaded Comanches and Kiowas who were still raiding into the nations. The land was also to be used for the settlement of the freedmen (which never happened).

As a result of the population problems with the ex-slaves and the Chickasaws, the government refused to pay for the land that became known as the Leased District or Leased Lands. Although the government had promised to pay the two tribes $300,000 for the land, it never did so with the reason being that the Chickasaw had violated the provisions of the treaty by never granting citizenship to their ex-slaves.

The citizenship problem did not however mean that if a freedman and a citizen got married they would not become citizens. On the contrary, they were readily accepted as citizens by marriage and their children were given citizenship by blood and birth.

Eventually, the Atoka Agreement, 1897; the Curtis Act, 1898; and the Act of July 1, 1902, also known as the Supplemental Agreement to the Atoka Agreement, set cutoff limits to the birth dates of freedmen descendents and other problems with the freedmen. The Supplemental Agreement is also the act that established Platt National Park.

After the Civil War, poor white farmers and ex-slaves, from the Deep South, poured into Texas and Indian Territory. After the enactment of the Supplemental Agreement in 1902, the enrollments began for the allotments. As mentioned before, there were somewhere between nine and ten thousand freedmen among the Chickasaws. Yet, when the rolls were opened, more than 65,000 blacks registered as freedmen of the Chickasaws.

It took years to straighten out the tangled mess of residency for the freedmen. By the time of the final resolution of citizenship, only about 3,500 freedmen were registered on the Chickasaw rolls.

One has to wonder why the government used such a heavy-handed tactic on these two nations? Where else in the history of the post civil war era was any white plantation owner in the South required to give any of their ex-slaves forty acres of their land and make them a member of their family?

I hope you enjoyed this story of how the freedmen faired in the final allotments. I also hope that you learned a little more on the history of Oklahoma. Please remember to support your local library. Next time you are passing the Mary Parker Library, stop and donate five or ten dollars at the librarian's desk. We desperately need the planned expansion.

© - Dennis Muncrief, May 2007.