> And the Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Catawba, and Creek tribes sided with the Confederacy against the United States.
I knew they were opposing the United States (at the time, an aggressively-expansionist neighbour with an order of magnitude more arms manufacturing), but were they all definitely allied with the Confederacy? Your enemies aren't necessarily friends with each other.
(Also, keep in mind: Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Catawba and Creek weren't countries. I vaguely remember that internal Cherokee politics was complicated, and that the US acted as though certain people were representatives when they weren't.)
You can read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Territory_in_the_Americ... for more information, but yes, several of the tribes in the Indian Territory did in fact make alliances with the Confederacy and fought on the side of the Confederacy against the Union.
The article said leaders from several tribes acted without the consensus of their councils. The Cherokee were split.[1] A Confederate source said just the Choctaw weren't.[2]
History is best viewed from the perspective of the individuals or groups with substantial power, because outcomes are their acting in their own best interests. Or what they perceived to be their best interests.
In the context of the Cherokee (which I'm more familiar with than other tribes), you initially have a group of mostly-independent city states, surrounded by neighboring tribes (with which there is good and bad history), dealing with substantial population decrease (due to smallpox), trying to negotiate with a fundamentally different culture (colonies/US) encroaching on their lands. Think 10th century Europe.
There were a diversity of opinions on how to move forward, and so a diversity of approaches, as groups jostled for personal advantage. Fundamentally though, it was a delaying action, fought (economically, politically, and militarily) until ceaseless European migration made coexistence as equals untenable.
The Cherokee have a somewhat unique history in that, by the late 1700s, they were moving to colonial style economics (land ownership, farming), politics (central government), language (invention and dissemination of written language in the 1820s), and religion [0].
Unfortunately, 1829 also saw gold discovered in northwest Georgia, at which point there was too much money to be made by seizing and exploiting land, and any burgeoning cultural similarities and human rights were conveniently ignored so fortunes could be made.
Ah, the US civil war was three decades after the Indian Removal Act, so most of them were in modern-day Oklahoma (bordering Texas, Arkansas and Missouri). That makes sense. For some reason I placed the US civil war about 50 years earlier.
I knew they were opposing the United States (at the time, an aggressively-expansionist neighbour with an order of magnitude more arms manufacturing), but were they all definitely allied with the Confederacy? Your enemies aren't necessarily friends with each other.
(Also, keep in mind: Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Catawba and Creek weren't countries. I vaguely remember that internal Cherokee politics was complicated, and that the US acted as though certain people were representatives when they weren't.)