The Civil War inside the Civil War
I don't remember hearing about these units before in my social studies curricula, though I have seen representations of Native Americans being used as Union scouts in movies and TV shows. This is hardly surprising, given my memory these days, but I suspect that were I to go back to my school-days history books, I wouldn't find much. This is, again, not particularly surprising as these texts had a lot to cover and tended to hit the highlights. I shall refrain from suggesting any others reasons for any lack of information in my schooling.
In the early days of the war, the union pulled a large part of its troops in the west to aid in the efforts to the east and south. Because more things than nature abhor a vacuum, Confederate troops moved into the now unoccupied or barely unoccupied areas, including the area known as Indian Territory, which is mostly the state of Oklahoma.
There they began actively recruiting Native Americans, training and equipping them and forming them into fighting units, usually under the command of a white officer but with the lesser officer ranks filled by Native Americans. These troops were largely composed of men from what some call the Five Civilized Tribes -- the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminoles, though other tribes populated the area.
These five tribes came to Indian Territory because of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, passed under the administration of Andrew Jackson, who believed Native Americans stood in the way of American, i.e. white people's, progress. After battles and court cases, the tribes were forced to move onto reservations in Indian Territory
Three factions arose. One faction was basically neutral toward the politics of the war but provided troops as part of treaty terms offered by the Confederacy. Another had an interest in maintaining slavery because many of the faction's influential leaders were slave holders. The last group opposed slavery and sided with the Union. All sides were more concerned with tribal sovereignty and survival.
I didn't come across anything that specifically said this, but I imagine that this action of forced removal made it easy for many of the tribe members to join the Confederate effort in the hopes that maybe the Rebs would be more faithful to the promises they made to the tribes.
The Confederates and their allied tribal units immediately began offensives against those tribal members allied with the Union. Many of the latter fled with escaped and emancipated slaves to Kansas, where the Union government offered protection. Sometimes members of Confederate units would defect to the Union side.
These refugees to Kansas came with little to nothing, sparking a humanitarian crisis, and were not always welcomed by white Kansas residents. But they also provided the basis for the formation of three regiments of troops, called Indian Home Guards, that were then pressed into service to take back the Indian Territory.
Several battles were fought in the attempt to regain the territory, prompting some writers to refer to the struggle as the Civil War within the Civil War. The Union eventually prevailed -- the battle at Honey Springs being one of the most significant Union victories. But the end of the war saw the Indian Territory devasted from the fighting and deep divides between and among the tribes. Like most everything else about the war, healing took a long time.
Some 20,000 to 30,000 Native Americans, depending on your sources, participated in the conflict. But their struggles would not end.
Image: Retrieved from "The Forgotten Warriors of the Civil War," posted by the National Park Service
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