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• 1 2024-09-20T18:10:33+00:00 Migrations of Blacks Among the Cherokees 11 plain 2025-03-04T21:25:27+00:00 The Africans and their descendants enslaved by Cherokees not only shared the sorrow of constant migration and the struggle to survive in new lands as they were moved to reservations by the US government, but also bore the burden of supporting their enslavers on their journey and in settling down. In their forced removal from the Cherokee homelands in the Southeast to the Indian Territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, and to adjacent states during the Civil War, the Black enslaved people were moved with the Cherokees. As outlined in their interviews, many Cherokee Freedmen applicants moved between towns and states across the US South, both on and off of Indigenous lands. This frequent movement made it challenging for some Cherokee Freedmen applicants to return to the Cherokee Nation within the designated time, which was among the qualifications for seeking citizenship.
   
  In the winter of 1838–39, enslaved Africans traveled with the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears. The long journey that stretched around 5,045 miles (about 8,120 km) included overland routes and one main water route across nine states.¹ Among the 15,000 Cherokees to set out for the west, enslaved people cleared the trails for easier travel, cared for the slaveholding families, hunted, cooked, prepared for camping and packing, and also kept night watch with arms.² Once in the Indian Territory, the enslaved Africans became valued laborers for rebuilding the lives of Cherokees and the Cherokee Nation. However, this economic advantage of the slaveholders enlarged the slave market in the Cherokee Nation, creating more economic and political division in the Nation. 
  Before the Civil War, the division between Union-supporting and Confederate-supporting Cherokees prompted many Cherokee enslavers to move from the Cherokee Nation to nearby states such as Kansas, Arkansas, and Texas, or the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations. You can find more information by hovering over the locations on the map. Many of them moved to Texas, which was the last state to abolish slavery.³ 
  
  During the Civil War, sixteen battles occurred in Indian Territory, out of which seven were in the Cherokee Nation, severely disrupting the everyday lives of the Cherokees and the individuals they enslaved.⁴ In the midst of the frenzy of the war and relocations, family members of the enslaved were also separated, lost, or sold. As the number of Cherokees moving away from the war-trodden Cherokee land increased, enslaved people found more opportunities to seek freedom on their own as well. When they arrived at a new place, some enslaved people were hired out to residents in their new settlements, since the Cherokee enslavers had no land to crop.⁵ These changes meant that those enslaved by the Cherokees had to readjust to new land and people outside of their familiar setting back in the Cherokee Nation. 
  
  The relocation of Cherokee families and enslaved Blacks outside the Cherokee Nation jeopardized the Freedmen applicants’ later claims to Cherokee citizenship. According to the Treaty of 1866, the applicants had to have returned to the Cherokee Nation legal territories within six months after the treaty was proclaimed. Meeting this deadline required the now freed Blacks hearing the news about the treaty to have enough time to prepare for their return and gather resources for the trip back. This meant that some of the Cherokee Freedmen had to leave behind the lives they cultivated when they followed the Cherokee slaveholders outside of the Nation. Despite these difficulties, the desire of many Cherokee Freedmen to return to the Cherokee Nation shows that many formerly enslaved people recognized the Cherokee Nation as their home and as a place of belonging. 
  
  Following their return, the freed people would search for their lost family members, build houses, cultivate crops, and try to make a living with their newly gained liberty in lands they identified as home. The continuing history of the freed people’s relocation and adjustment is a testimony to the vibrant reorganizing of their social networks. 
  
  Many locations mentioned in the Cherokee Freedmen applicants' interviews can be found on the map below. Find more information by hovering over the locations on the map.
  

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  Footnotes

  1. Elizabeth Prine Pauls, “Trail of Tears,” Encyclopedia Britannica, September 24, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/event/Trail-of-Tears.↵
  2. Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (The University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 71.↵
  3. Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state in early 1861, and Arkansas came under Union control by 1864 and adopted an anti-slavery constitution on March 16, 1864.↵
  4. Celia E. Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 134–35.↵
  5. Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory, 145.↵