Native Americans in The American Civil War

Native Americans in the American Civil War composed various Native American bands, tribes, and nations. Native Americans served in both the Union and Confederate military during the American Civil War. At the outbreak of the war, for example, the minority party of the Cherokees gave its allegiance to the Confederacy, while originally the majority party went for the North. Native Americans fought knowing they might jeopardize their freedom, unique cultures, and ancestral lands if they ended up on the losing side of the Civil War. 28,693 Native Americans served in the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War, participating in battles such as Pea Ridge, Second Manassas, Antietam, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and in Federal assaults on Petersburg. A few Native American tribes, such as the Creek and the Choctaw, were slaveholders and found a political and economic commonality with the Confederacy. The Choctaw owned nearly 6000 slaves.

Read more about Native Americans In The American Civil War:  Overview of The War, Problems in The Midwest and West, Native Americans in The Confederate Army, Tribes Involved in Battles, See Also

Famous quotes containing the words civil war, native, americans, american, civil and/or war:

    They have been waiting for us in a foetor
    Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
    Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
    Of the expropriated mycologist.
    Derek Mahon (b. 1941)

    There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate; not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries.
    Edith Wharton (1862–1937)

    Movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century. Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them—as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.
    Ben Hecht (1893–1964)

    The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow—one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Colonel Shaw
    and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
    on St. Gaudens shaking Civil War relief,
    propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.
    Robert Lowell (1917–1977)

    The trumpets sound, the banners fly,
    The glittering spears are ranked ready;
    The shouts o’ war are heard afar,
    The battle closes thick and bloody;
    But it’s no the roar o’ sea or shore
    Wad mak me langer wish to tarry;
    Nor shout o’ war that’s heard afar,
    Its leaving thee, my bonnie Mary.
    Robert Burns (1759–1796)