When it was all over, about one-third of the women of the territory were widows, and 14% of children were orphans.

Why did the Native American tribes even care about the great conflict, which took hundreds of thousands of lives in the North and South? It had little to do with the issues like the tariff and slavery that led to the secession of 11 southern states and then to the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln moved to bring the seceding states back into the Union by military force.

There were few slaveowners in Indian Territory probably 1% and while they no doubt held much greater influence over tribal government than the average member of their tribes, it is doubtful that they viewed the conflict as having anything to do with the institution of slavery within their borders.

Actually, there were multiple reasons tribal governments cast their lot with the Confederate States of America.

First of all, most Indian agents were southerners, and they no doubt influenced tribal leaders to side with the South. Albert Pike was commissioned by the Confederate government to make treaties, and he was very successful.

After the mostly southern agents resigned, the newly-appointed agents remained in Kansas, wary of going south into Indian Territory. They would have no protection, as federal troops had pulled out of the seven federal forts that had been established to keep the peace between the Five Civilized Tribes to the east and the Plains Indian tribes to the west.

Other than Kansas, Indian Territory was bordered by southern states Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. Although Missouri was officially still in the Union, southwestern Missouri was very sympathetic to the Confederate cause.

The Five Tribes Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole had come from the southeast, and the cultural ties were still quite strong.

While the Five Tribes had been removed from the southeast a generation earlier, at the behest of the white population of that region, it had been the federal government that actually carried out the removals.

And then there was William Seward, the campaign manager and eventually the secretary of state for the new president, Abraham Lincoln. When Seward was making his own bid for president in 1860, he had vowed to open Indian Territory to white settlement and the tribes, who followed national politics, knew it.

Finally, the Confederates promised to honor Union treaties.

For the Confederacy, the advantage of an alliance was clear: the territory was a source of grain, meat and lead and salt mines. It would also provide a buffer between Union Kansas and Confederate Texas.

In that regard, the tribes fulfilled their part of the agreements, as Union forces were never able to make it to Texas.

Steve Byas teaches Oklahoma History at Randall University in Moore, and lives in Norman.

Originally posted here:

Oklahoma history: Why the Tribes sided with the Confederacy - Norman Transcript