Category: University Of Oklahoma

19, 1863 — shortly after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect — the Cherokee Nation issued An Act Providing for the Abolition of Slavery in the Cherokee Nation, which called for “the immediate emancipation of all Slaves in the Cherokee Nation.” In a treaty ratified on July 27, 1866, the […]

John Ross (1790-1866) was the most important Cherokee political leader of the nineteenth century. He helped establish the Cherokee national government and served as the Cherokee Nation’s principal chief for almost 40 years. What famous Indian was Cherokee? Sequoyah’s Syllabary: From Ridicule to Fame. Sequoyah was born in the Cherokee […]

12 million Indigenous people. In the ensuing email exchange, Thornton indicated that his own rough estimate is that about 12 million Indigenous people died in what is today the coterminous United States between 1492 and 1900. 60 This number of deaths is almost 2.5 times the estimated decline in the […]

The southern part of the New Mexico Territory, which was the Gadsen Purchase, sided with the Confederacy, while the northern section was Union. New Mexico supplied 26 Union military units. The Wikipedia article, New Mexico in the American Civil War, has more information about New Mexico’s activities during the war. […]

Cherokee language, Cherokee name Tsalagi Gawonihisdi, North American Indian language, a member of the Iroquoian family, spoken by the Cherokee (Tsalagi) people originally inhabiting Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Did the Cherokee have their own language? Sequoyah was one of the most influential […]

Slavery itself was never widespread in the North, though many of the region’s businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. What states had slaves in the North? Slavery was a dominant feature of the antebellum South, but it was also pervasive in the pre-Civil War […]