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From The Public Professor
These days it’s not often that American Indian affairs make for national news. But the press is now knee deep in coverage of a political dispute in the Cherokee nation. The issue concerns the citizenship of so-called Cherokee Freedmen, the descendants of slaves once held by Cherokee plantation owners.
The Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Muscogees, and Seminoles were the five most powerful Indian nations in the American South during the 18th and 19th centuries. All of them, except for the Seminoles, developed cotton plantations and U.S. style, race-based slavery. Among these Native nations, as was the case in the United States, it was a small minority of wealthy plantation owners who owned the slaves.
During the early 19th century, the U.S. engaged in an ethnic cleansing policy euphemistically called Removal, which reached its apex during the Andrew Jackson administration of the 1820s-30s. Under threat of military action, all five of these nations were forced to move west to what was then called Indian Territory and is now Oklahoma. The slaveholders among them brought along most of their slaves.
When the U.S. Civil War erupted, the Cherokee government pledged its loyalty to the Union, but received no immediate support. Bordering Texas, the Cherokee nation came under intense pressure from the Confederacy. In 1861, Principal Chief John Ross agreed to a treaty of alliance with the Confederacy, though the agreement stipulated that Cherokees would not fight outside of Indian Territory, thereby precluding their use as an aggressive force against the Union.
From Peter Beinart in the New York Review of Books:
On that supercharged day in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., she rode her way into history books, credited with helping to ignite the civil rights movement.
In the first narrative of my experience in slavery, written nearly forty years ago, and in various writings since, I have given the public what I considered very good reasons for withholding the manner of my escape. In substance these reasons were, first, that such publication at any time during the existence of slavery might be used by the master against the slave, and prevent the future escape of any who might adopt the same means that I did. The second reason was, if possible, still more binding to silence: the publication of details would certainly have put in peril the persons and property of those who assisted. Murder itself was not more sternly and certainly punished in the State of Maryland than that of aiding and abetting the escape of a slave. Many colored men, for no other crime than that of giving aid to a fugitive slave, have, like Charles T. Torrey, perished in prison. The abolition of slavery in my native State and throughout the country, and the lapse of time, render the caution hitherto observed no longer necessary. But even since the abolition of slavery, I have sometimes thought it well enough to baffle curiosity by saying that while slavery existed there were good reasons for not telling the manner of my escape, and since slavery had ceased to exist, there was no reason for telling it. I shall now, however, cease to avail myself of this formula, and, as far as I can, endeavor to satisfy this very natural curiosity. I should, perhaps, have yielded to that feeling sooner, had there been anything very heroic or thrilling in the incidents connected with my escape, for I am sorry to say I have nothing of that sort to tell; and yet the courage that could risk betrayal and the bravery which was ready to encounter death, if need be, in pursuit of freedom, were essential features in the undertaking. My success was due to address rather than courage, to good luck rather than bravery. My means of escape were provided for me by the very men who were making laws to hold and bind me more securely in slavery.
The author of a new book talks about the brain’s hidden impulses, and why you’re more biased than you think:
THE late Paul Samuelson once quipped that “women are just men with less money”. As a father of six, he might have added something about women’s role in the reproduction of the species. But his aphorism is about as good a one-sentence summary of classical feminism as you can get.
From Tricia Wang’s blog 