Destroying each other: race and the clash of cultures in the Indian Territory Civil War

Abstract

Most historians of the Civil War have neglected Indian Territory. Those historians who write on the Indian Territory Civil War, like Annie Abel and Mary Jane Warde, focus on tribal political intrigue or the effect of the war on tribal society. Little has been written on how the combatants fought the Civil War in Indian Territory. This thesis intends to add to the extant conversations of the Indian Territory Civil War by examining how the war was fought from a cultural perspective. The Indian Territory Civil War was a clash of cultures between a Euro-American way of warfare and Native way of warfare. Both ways of war were blurred in practice, with Whites expecting Natives to fight according to European conventions and then accusing Natives of “savagery” when Native people shifted to fight in their traditional modes in scalping or fighting guerrilla-style campaigns. Historically White people in North America also scalped and fought in irregular modes, but prior to the Civil War they tried to distance themselves from Native war making warfare by adopting European (largely French) modes of war making. In the blurring of these modes of war making, Whites created a racial distinction without a difference. White Confederates also recognized a racial difference in how the war was fought by categorically excluding Black Union soldiers from the safeguards afforded to surrendering soldiers in the Euro-American military culture. Confederates, White and Native, massacred Black Union soldiers, refusing to afford them the opportunity to surrender. The Indian Territory Civil War, therefore, was simultaneously a war between the Union and Confederacy, an Indian war, and a race war.