On June 29, 2022, Fay A. Yarbrough discussed her book "Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country" as part of the History Is Lunch series.
When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people. The tribe had owned enslaved Blacks since the 1720s, and by the eve of the Civil War, 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation consisted of enslaved Blacks.
“The Choctaw Nation were avid supporters of the Confederate States of America, and they passed a measure requiring all whites living in its territory to swear allegiance to the Confederacy,” said Yarbrough. “Choctaws also raised an infantry force and a cavalry to fight alongside Confederate forces.”
While sovereignty and states’ rights mattered to Choctaw leaders, Yarbrough writes that the survival of slavery also determined the Nation’s support of the Confederacy. Mining service records for approximately 3,000 members of the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles, Yarbrough examines the experiences of Choctaw soldiers and notes that although their enthusiasm waned as the war persisted, military service allowed them to embrace traditional masculine roles that were disappearing in a changing political and economic landscape.
“A scrupulous Civil War history that reads at times like a political thriller, Choctaw Confederates shows why and how Native American statesmen, police officers, soldiers, and family members identified with the South’s martial cause in order to protect Indigenous sovereignty and defend a system of racial slavery,” wrote Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. “In the hands of Fay Yarbrough, a most talented historian of Black-Native relations and Indian Territory, this sensitive subject is handled with care and interpreted through a revealing range of Native American as well as African American sources. This book offers a penetrating look at a Native American state that chose to support the Confederate states and at the population of enslaved Blacks over whose bodies these ideological battles were fought.”
Fay A. Yarbrough is professor of history and associate dean of humanities for undergraduate programs and special projects at Rice University. She earned her BA in history and political science from Rice University, her MA and PhD in U.S. history from Emory University. Yarbrough’s first book was Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century, and she is co-editor with Sandra Slater of Gender and Sexuality in the Indigenous Americas, 1400-1850. Yarbrough has published in the Journal of Social History, Journal of Southern History, and the edited volumes Race and Science and Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States. In 2020 she was visiting editor at the Journal of Southern History.
History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi.
