Although many Indian nations fought in the Civil War, general
history often underrepresents the role of Native Americans in the
conflict. Indian nations did, in fact, suffer a higher percentage
of casualties than any Union or Confederate state, and the war
almost destroyed the Cherokee Nation. In The Confederate Cherokees,
W. Craig Gaines provides an absorbing account of the Cherokees'
involvement in the early years of the Civil War, focusing in
particular on the actions of one group, John Drew's Regiment of
Mounted Rifles. By the time the Civil War began, internal political
dissension tore at the solidarity of the Cherokee tribe and a
simmering thirty-year-old blood feud threatened to drive an even
deeper divide. Entry into the war on the Confederate side
intensified these intratribal tensions and ultimately two distinct
factions emerged. One faction, loyal to Chief John Ross and led by
John Drew- Ross's nephew by marriage- formed a regiment. Another
unit rallied around Ross's rival, Stand Watie. The Watie regiment
was largely pro-Confederate, whereas many of Drew's soldiers,
though fighting for the Confederate cause, secretly allied with a
pro-Union, antislavery society known as the Keetoowahs. They had
little sympathy for the southern whites, who had driven them from
their ancestral homelands in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina,
Kentucky, and Tennessee. Drew's regiment nonetheless earned a
degree of infamy during the Battle of Pea Ridge, in Arkansas, for
scalping Union soldiers. Gaines unfolds the history of Drew's
regiment amid a larger narrative of military events within the
Indian Territory. United action, as he shows, proved almost
impossible because of continuing factionalism within the tribes and
the desertion of many Native Americans to the Union forces. Indeed,
Drew's regiment, effectively disbanded by mid-1862, bears the
distinction of being the only Confederate regiment to lose almost
its entire membership through desertion to the Union ranks.
General
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