The Red and the Black: African Americans and Cherokees in Antebellum America | The Defenders Online | A Civil Rights Blog

The Red and the Black: African Americans and Cherokees in Antebellum America | The Defenders Online | A Civil Rights Blog
By Kenneth J. Cooper

Most people are astonished when I tell them the Cherokees owned slaves. Schools don’t teach about the slaveholding of the Cherokee and four other tribes who, most ironically, became known as the “Five Civilized Tribes.” The participation of some Native Americans in the abominable institution has to be one of its oddest dimensions.

Fortunately, a handful of diligent scholars have written books that do a good job of documenting this unusual part of American history. The first were “Red over Black” by R. Halliburton Jr. and “The Cherokee Freedmen” by Daniel F. Littlefield, both published in the Seventies. They have been followed by the more recent treatments of Katja May in 1996 and Celia E. Naylor in 2008.

Together, these academic books show how leaders of a young United States—as a matter of official policy—pressured the Cherokees and the other southeastern tribes to abandon hunting, practice large-scale agriculture and adopt slavery, all in the interest of becoming “civilized,” or more like white settlers. Most Cherokees never owned slaves. But most members of the prosperous, mixed white-Cherokee elite that governed the tribe did, on plantations that resembled those of southern white planters.

Starting in the early 1800s, the biggest Cherokee slaveholders belonged to the Vann family. James Vann owned as many as 115 slaves in Georgia and Tennessee. After his violent death in 1809, favored son Joseph Vann held a similar number in those states and Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, after relocating there ahead of the brutal forced march carried out by US troops in the winter of 1838 known as the “Trail of Tears.”

The Vanns are at the center of a new book, “The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story,” by Tiya Miles, a professor of history, American studies, Afro-American studies and Native American studies at the University of Michigan. Miles has emerged as a leading scholar of relations between African Americans and Cherokees. Her first book, published in 2005, “Ties that Bind,” narrated the lives of a Cherokee man and his black wife who lived in the 1800s.