UNC Press - Black Slaves, Indian Masters

<SPAN STYLE= "" >Black Slaves, Indian Masters</SPAN>

232 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 11 halftones, notes, bibl., index

Cloth

ISBN 978-1-4696-0710-8

Available: August 2013

Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South

From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes' removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory. The tribes formulated racial and gender ideologies that justified this practice and marginalized free black people in the Indian nations well after the Civil War and slavery had ended. Through the end of the nineteenth century, ongoing conflicts among Choctaw, Chickasaw, and U.S. lawmakers left untold numbers of former slaves and their descendants in the two Indian nations without citizenship in either the Indian nations or the United States. In this groundbreaking study, Barbara Krauthamer rewrites the history of southern slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native American slaveholders and the black people they enslaved.

Krauthamer's examination of slavery and emancipation highlights the ways Indian women's gender roles changed with the arrival of slavery and changed again after emancipation and reveals complex dynamics of race that shaped the lives of black people and Indians both before and after removal.

About the Author

Barbara Krauthamer is assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Reviews

"A brilliant exploration of the entangled histories of African American slavery and Indian dispossession. Rich, superbly researched, and fascinating."
--Stephanie M. H. Camp, University of Washington, Seattle

"Black Slaves, Indian Masters is a broad, lucid, robust study of Blacks in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations from the period of slavery through emancipation. Barbara Krauthamer carefully asserts critical insights and tough arguments about the nature of slavery, racial hierarchy, and Black resistance in these communities. Her sharp analysis not only reveals variations in slaveholding practices and outcomes in Indian Territory, but also the integral links between an expanding U.S. cotton kingdom, Indian Removal, and Native slave ownership."
--Tiya Miles, author of The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story

"In this powerfully written and carefully researched study, Barbara Krauthamer tells a wholly new story of slavery and emancipation. Her attention to the declining land and sovereignty of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations in the context of their ownership of slaves complicates our understanding of the ways African Americans experienced and resisted bondage. The traditional historical landmarks along the road to the Civil War and its aftermath will never look quite the same."
--Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Harvard University