Career
In 1851 at age eighteen, Boudinot returned West and taught school briefly. In 1853 he settled in Fayetteville, Arkansas near the Cherokee, and renewed contact with his uncle Stand Watie. He studied as a legal apprentice and passed the bar in 1856 in Arkansas.
His first notable victory as a lawyer was defending his uncle Stand Watie against murder charges. Watie had killed James Foreman, one of the attackers of Major Ridge, Watie's uncle, who was killed in 1839 together with his son John Ridge and brother Elias Boudinot. Watie had survived the attack. Boudinot wanted to revive his family's prominence among the Cherokee.
In Arkansas, Boudinot became active as a pro-slavery advocate in the Democratic Party, the majority position of party members. He was elected to the city council of Fayetteville in 1859. That year, together with James Pettigrew, he founded a pro-slavery newspaper, The Arkansan; it favored having railroads constructed into Indian Territory. Some of the American Indians did not want their territory broken up by such intrusions. Boudinot urged the territory to regularize its status with the United States, and later supported measures needed to admit Oklahoma as a state.
The following year he was chosen as the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic State Central Committee and monitored rising tensions in the country. In 1861, he served as secretary of the Secession Convention as the territory determined whether it would leave the Union. In 1863, Boudinot was elected a delegate to the Congress of the Confederate States, representing the majority faction of Cherokee who supported the Confederacy. (A minority supported the Union.)
During the American Civil War, Boudinot fought for the Confederate States Army under his uncle Stand Watie. Commissioned as an officer, Boudinot reached the rank of lieutenant colonel.
After the war, Boudinot was chairman of the Cherokee Deligation (south) to the Southern Treaty Commission which renegotiated treaties with the United States.
Read more about this topic: Elias Cornelius Boudinot
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