Celia Naylor, "'She Better Off Dead than Jest Livin' for the Whip': Enslaved Women's Resistance in the Nineteenth-Century Cherokee Nation"
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Even though some historians have contended that Cherokee slave-owners practiced a "benign" form of slavery, such a proposition fails to reflect the thoughts of Nancy Roger Bean's aunt when she mounted that auction block. Enslaved people in Indian Territory fully recognized that they were enslaved human beings—the property of Indians. They were acutely aware that neither they nor their offspring were free. Some had family members and friends who ran away or challenged their enslavement via other avenues; in fact, multigenerational acts of resistance possibly served as signposts of a family's legacy of rebellion. Others, like Charlotte Johnson White, had not only witnessed the beatings of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, and uncles but also experienced the whip for themselves. Such images, sensations, and scars remained firmly imprinted in their psyche as well as on their bodies for decades; the memories and marks would be with them, as Charlotte Johnson White uttered, even in the afterworld. Enslaved people, particularly enslaved women, understood that slavery compromised family ties. Even as an owner extended some degree of kindness one day, s/he possessed the power to sell one's parent, spouse, sibling, or child the very next day. Some enslaved in the Cherokee Nation recognized that the daily distinctions between themselves and their owners only confirmed that they were not deemed equal participants in Indian communities. Instead, they remained property—objects that could be bought and sold at an owner's whim.

Although living in predominantly Cherokee communities, some enslaved people renounced thoughts of a collective identity with Cherokee people. Instead, they demonstrated their resistance to such notions of collectivity by committing "crimes" ranging from "talking back" to their enslavers to even murdering them.[20] For those who ran away from their Indian owners, the desire for freedom surpassed any identification with Native Americans and any sense of "loyalty." To believe that Indian cultures made bondage more tenable to people of African descent or somehow countered the denigrating process of enslavement is to deny the insidious nature of a system based on the ownership of human beings. For many enslaved people who were kin to their Cherokee masters and mistresses, the denial of this blood connection only verified the corrupting force of bondage.

Shattering the notion of a safe haven, scattered documents reveal stories of the resistance of enslaved women and men to daily indignities of bondage in the antebellum Cherokee Nation. A range of disorderly acts fashioned the inner lives of those enslaved in an Indian country that, to them, represented not a sanctuary but a site of severe repression. Though the actions of individual enslaved people alone did not terminate the presence of slavery in Cherokee territory, their opposition to bondage exposed the precious and meaningful substance of freedom to the free and unfree in the Cherokee Nation.

Endnotes

1. For works dealing with slave resistance in the United States and the Caribbean, see, for example, Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1963); John H. Bracey, Jr., August Meier and Elliott Rudwick , eds., American Slavery: the Question of Resistance (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1971); Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1990); Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: a Case Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua, with Implications for Colonial British America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985); David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, ed., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); Darlene Clark Hine and Kate Wittenstein, "Female Slave Resistance: The Economics of Sex," in The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, ed. Filomina Chioma Steady (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1981), 289-299; Gary Y. Okihiro, ed., In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean and Afro-American History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986); Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985) and Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1975). [Return to text]

2. Camp, Closer to Freedom. [Return to text]

3. Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 98. [Return to text]

4. Michael Roethler, "Negro Slavery Among the Cherokee Indians, 1540-1866" (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1964), 129. [Return to text]

5. The brevity of Bibb's time in Indian Territory no doubt informed his particular experiences. Gilbert Osofsky, ed., Puttin' on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown and Solomon Northup (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 141. [Return to text]

6. The Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles owned and occupied large areas of land in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and smaller portions of land in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The significant population of slaves in Indian Territory has heightened the discussion of slavery among the so-called "Five Civilized Tribes." Using the count conducted in 1860 by the United States Census Office, Michael Doran proffered an estimate of the number of Native Americans, African-American slaves, and European-Americans residing in Indian Territory in 1860. He deduced that in the Cherokee Nation, there were 13,821 Indian citizens (81%), 2,511 slaves (15%), and 716 whites (4%); in the Choctaw Nation, there were 13,666 Indian citizens (81%), 2,349 slaves (14%), and 804 whites (5%); in the Chickasaw Nation, there were 4,260 Indian citizens (79%), 975 slaves (18%), and 148 whites (3%); in the Creek Nation, there were 13,550 Indian citizens (86%), 1,532 slaves (10%), and 596 whites (4%); and in the Seminole Nation, there were 2,630 Indian citizens (71%), 1,000 slaves (29%), and 35 whites. See Michael F. Doran, "Population Statistics of Nineteenth-Century Indian Territory," Chronicles of Oklahoma 53, no. 4 (1975-1976): 501. [Return to text]

7. For a thorough analysis of how race and bondage shaped legislation within the Cherokee Nation, see Fay Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). [Return to text]

8. In order to disseminate information about the occurrences in the new land, the first issue of the Cherokee Advocate was printed in the new Cherokee capital of Tahlequah on 26 September 1844. This weekly newspaper's motto was "Our Rights, Our Country, Our Race." The Cherokee Advocate was not the first Cherokee newspaper to be published. The Cherokee Phoenix had been established in 1828 prior to removal to Indian Territory. [Return to text]

9. See, for example, the runaway slave advertisement for Harvey in the Cherokee Advocate, September 18, 1848. The same advertisement for Harvey also appeared in the following three weekly issues of the Cherokee Advocate. Also see the runaway slave advertisement for Isaac in the Cherokee Advocate, September 3, 1849, and for George in the Cherokee Advocate, April 30, 1849. The same advertisement for George also appeared in the following three weekly issues of the Cherokee Advocate. [Return to text]

10. For interviews specifically with former slaves living in Oklahoma, see George P. Rawick, ed., Oklahoma and Mississippi Narratives, vol. 7 of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973), Oklahoma Narratives, vol. 12, Supplement Series 1 of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977), and T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker, eds., The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996). Volume 7 of Rawick's collection includes the interviews of seventy-five ex-slaves and/or children of ex-slaves. Of these seventy-five interviewees, a total of fourteen self-identified as ex-slaves or children of ex-slaves of Native Americans in Indian Territory—six Cherokee ex-slaves, four Creek ex-slaves, two Choctaw ex-slaves, and two Chickasaw ex-slaves. Volume 12 of Rawick's collection includes the interviews of sixty-seven ex-slaves or children of ex-slaves. Of these sixty-seven interviewees, a total of thirty-four identified themselves as ex-slaves or children of ex-slaves of Native Americans in Indian Territory—sixteen Cherokee ex-slaves, nine Choctaw ex-slaves, eight Creek ex-slaves, and one Chickasaw ex-slave. Initially deposited in the Library of Congress, the WPA interviews of ex-slaves remained a relatively untapped source of information until Greenwood Press' publication of these interviews in the 1970s. The WPA conducted interviews with ex-slaves living in South Carolina, Texas, Alabama, Indiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Georgia, North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Tennessee, Florida, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, and Washington. In April 2001, the Library of Congress announced the release of the online collection, "Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938," at the American Memory Web site: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml. This online collection includes over 2,300 interviews and 500 black-and-white photographs of ex-slave interviewees. [Return to text]

11. Rawick, American Slave, vol. 7, 346. [Return to text]

12. Ibid., 347. [Return to text]

13. Michael F. Doran, "Population Statistics of Nineteenth-Century Indian Territory," Chronicles of Oklahoma 53, no. 4 (winter 1975-1976): 501. [Return to text]

14. Baker and Baker, The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives, 465. Charlotte Johnson White's interview is one of the Oklahoma interviews that was published for the first time in Baker and Baker's book. [Return to text]

15. Ibid. [Return to text]

16. Ibid. [Return to text]

17. Rawick, American Slave, vol. 7, 347. [Return to text]

18. See Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998) and Fay Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). [Return to text]

19. Rawick, American Slave, vol. 7, 13. [Return to text]

20. Cherokee Grover C. Hanna, for example, recalled the surprising actions of one particular trusted slave called "Nigger Smoot." One night, Hanna's uncle, "expecting to go turkey hunting the next morning, had Smoot help him mould bullets to use. That day, Uncle had sold a good horse and had the money in the house. That night after they had gone to sleep, Smoot took an ax, killed Uncle Harry and pounded Aunt Cyntha until he thought she was dead. Then taking the money, a good horse, and an old rifle he left the place." One of Hanna's other uncles, Zeke Proctor, "trailed him from the Illinois River to Fredonia, Kansas." Proctor located Smoot and forcibly returned him to the Cherokee Nation, where he was hung ten days after murdering his master. Grant Foreman, comp., Indian Pioneer History Collection, vol. 27, 335-336. Archives and Manuscripts Division, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. [Return to text]

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