The Summer of 1866

Thousands of Slaves were not freed with the ratification of the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865. These slaves would have to wait until the Summer of 1866 for their freedom.

Neil P. Chatelain wrote a piece for Emerging Civil War where he describes how the slaves of the “Five Civilized Tribes” were freed. The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole Nations held between 7,000 and 10,000 slaves in what was then Indian Territory and is now the largest part of Oklahoma. Most of these Indians sided with the Confederacy and because of their unique relationship with the United States, new treaties were necessary for the Indians to be required to give up their slaves.

There were four key elements to the new treaties:

• Half of the reservation lands they were forced to accept in previous treaties was taken as punishment for siding with the Confederacy.
• A general amnesty was declared for all Indians “who had violated previous treaties, broken laws, or joined in the Southern rebellion”.
• An end to slavery with language identical to the 13th Amendment.
• The freed slaves were to be recognized as citizens of their respective tribes.

To properly understand this, one needs to recall that these Indian tribes were not native to Oklahoma but were relocated there at the insistence of the United States Government. The Trail of Tears and other coerced migrations resulted in Eastern and Southeastern tribes being relocated to west of the Mississippi River. In the 19th century we forcibly moved Indians and in the 21st century we remove Indians from our culture, so we don’t have to think about it.

The original Americans became citizens of the United States in 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act. It seems that with the requirement of the freed slaves to be citizens of their respective tribes that they were not US Citizens until then either.