For January 31, 2022
Interlude
November 7, 1775 — the Dunmore Proclamation and the promise of liberty to the enslaved by the British, resulting in a Black regiment with about 800 soldiers.
“Freedom is Not for Myself Alone” by Robert Jones, Jr. — short story from the point of view of a Black man fighting in the “Dunmore regiment” even as he is very mistrustful that this white master (“toubab”) is any better than others.
August 19, 1791 — letter from Black intellectual Benjamin Banneker to Thomas Jefferson a letter asking for abolition.
“Other Persons,” by Reginald Dwayne Betts — about Banneker’s letter and about the 3/5th compromise and euphemisms: “another word for slavery is a fraction.” It quotes from the constitution about the 3/5th rule, and several passages from Banneker’s letter.
Chapter 5: Dispossession, by Tyla Miles
This chapter is about the very complicated relationship between the Native American tribes and African enslaved people in the South, beginning in the late 18th century. The key tribes in question were the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. As people that were considered both “citizens of nations” but, unlike citizens of European countries being invaded by other European countries, “members of lower-order societies” especially because they were not Christians were in a position where they HAD to keep negotiating with, first, the British colonizers and then with the new independent American state about land and the continuing encroachment.
In 1785, the Cherokees and the American government signed the first Treaty of Hopewell, which was supposed to keep white settlers from settling on their land; similar treaties with the Choctaws and Chicasaws came shortly after. This promised some (precarious) protection but also separated Native Americans in important ways from Blacks: “white people were citizens, Black people were possessions, and Indigenous people were now subject to national interference.” Miles doesn’t quite call this a “wedge” strategy but it is; as she points out, it meant that Native American leaders were “indirectly encouraged to participate in a form of racial hierarchy that was considered part and parcel of civilized American society.” In the 18th and early 19th centuries, before the breaking of all treaties by the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, that meant that wealthier (and often culturally more white-adjacent) Native Americans owned enslaved people and also sometimes used racist stereotypes to ally themselves with the whites in power–first the British (for most of the American Revolution) and then the Americans.
Miles points out that a form of slavery was practiced by Southern tribes–“people of a lower caste (seized from other Native societies) were forced to labor for the chiefs they served” and also sometimes forced to die with that chief. This practice actually spread and intensified after the contact with Europeans, as Native Americans began raiding other tribes to kidnap people “to establish strong trade relations with the English, to service debts, and to avoid being hunted themselves” — which resulted in between 30,000 and 50,000 enslaved Native Americans in the early 18th century in the South alone. This did result in Native Americans and Africans being sold and traded together, in the same locations, and during this time, cultural merging happened through intermarriage (resulting in mixed-race, bicultural children, and some distinctive traits in the cuisine, the basketweaving tradition, and the trickster folklore, as well as pottery. [Fascinating: the source re the folklore is Jonathan Brennan, introduction to When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature, University of Illinois Press, 2003.] But Native Americans also absorbed and understood the prejudice and disempowerment of Black people (including the “following the belly” enslaved status for mixed children born to enslaved Black women), and began to also consider Blacks as inferior, especially when they tried to insist on their status as free citizens. Slavery was no longer a “bridge” but “a wall of division.”
As the attempt to “civilize” the Native Americans under Washington-appointed “superintendent to the Southern tribes” Benjamin Hawkins progressed in the 1790s and early 1800s, Natives were not only encouraged to settle and divide land into privately owned pieces, but also to enslave Blacks. Hawkins’ model farm on Creek nation territory modeled slave labor and racial hierarchies, and “slavery gradually took root” especially among the Cherokees (the numbers are small, though–2% of Native Americans were enslavers as per the 1860 census, vs. 20% of whites in the South. Miles uses the example of the Vanns–James Vann, his son “Rich Joe” Vann, and the Georgia plantation-style mansion he built on the back of enslaved labor. But all this imitation of white “civilization” didn’t help in the long run, and Andrew Jackson’s disempowerment and displacement campaign after the signing of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 exiled the wealthy as well as the poor in the Native tribes west to the Mississippi. In 1833, the Vanns were chased out of their house, and then, despite the (contested) treaty of New Echota in 1835 that seemed to promise that they and others who signed the contract without tribal authority could settle and rebuild in the new Western territories. They did get to the land early and got the best pick , before the Trail of Tears, which included “African Americans and Cherokees of African descent, both enslaved and free,” although it is not known how many Blacks were among Cherokee who died on the Trail–and I am not sure how many Blacks traveled with the 80,000 Indigenous people who were driven onto the reservations from the South and Midwest.
She notes that as a consequence of “Indian Removal” the white enslavers in the South had more voting power than before, because the number of Black enslaved increased and therefore the 3/5th population count that gave the South its congressional power. Slavery and Indian Removal are “twin evils” (quoted from David and Jeanne Heidler) at the base of the development of the US as a nation.
The chapter ends with a description of a recent virtual conference of the “Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes Association” for people descended by those Blacks who had been enslaved by Native Southerners, geared to raise awareness and educate people about their history and their concerns. She reminds us that the Native Americans who brought enslaved people to Indian Territory were often siding with the confederacy, and that it took treaty negotiations in 1866 to force them to free their ca. 8,000 enslaved people among them, which they often did reluctantly. This means that especially in Oklahoma, there has been a history of tension between the two minorities, and part of the goal of the organization, which was founded a mixed-race Black/Cherokee descendant of the Vann family (Marilyn Vann), is to make sure the treaty rights from 1866 are actually fully enforced, and that the Cherokee Nation give full civil rights to descendants of formerly enslaved people (a 2017 court decision finally settled that after 100+ years of strife). At the 2020 conference, there is finally “talk of connection” and not just of the rift, via a “shared history of dispossession and oppression”–something that the joint / solidarity protests at the Dakota Access Pipeline and BLM in 2020 have also shown.