The Past Speaks

I have been following the New York Times’s live blogging of the Civil War. Today’s blog post, the Choctaw Confederates, is about those First Nations who supported the Confederacy in the Civil War.

20,000 or so Choctaws – especially those whose families had intermarried with whites – now considered themselves not just Native Americans, but also Southerners. A significant number of tribal leaders owned black slaves.

For more, see here.

The contributor of this post is Adam Goodheart is the author of the forthcoming book “1861: The Civil War Awakening.” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.