Just how loyal were the Southern United States following the ACW?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Tennessee_Convention_of_1861

this should be interesting here. its also worth pointing out tho that alot of pro-union southerners sided with their families and neighbors over the federal government once secession actually happened.

Well, duh. Even the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alex Stephens, was a pro-Union Southerner who sided with his friends and neighbors once secession happened. It was a very common event.
 
well, as I've mentioned before, I think that Southern loyalty would've been cemented by say an earlier SAW say 5-10 yrs after 1865, or if the US went to war against Franz-Joseph in Mexico by 1867, whereby the ex-Confederates would've been much more galvanised into the national US war effort against an external foe- just as the OTL SAW in 1898 healed up the North-South rift (though regrettably not the racial rift) for good.

Historically, the 1873 Virginius crisis showed that what you say here is accurate. Former Confederates throughout the South were ready to go to war under the U.S. flag against Spain. One famous example is Nathan Bedford Forrest, who offered his services to the then-commanding general of the United States Army, his old nemesis, William T. Sherman. Sherman actually was ready to accept the offer and forwarded it to the War Department for consideration should war be declared.
 
Silly Jaded, of course only White people can be slave owners;)

It's funny how his answer is linking to a document where the Cherokee say essentially this.

The Five Civilized Tribes took with them some of their 'tributers' on the trek west of the Mississippi. As far as I'm concerned, if you have to follow your 'tributee' anywhere he goes, even if it's done by forcing him to, you're a slave. No amount of legal or linguistic jungle-gym play will get around this, just like the blacks 'freed' by the emancipation proclamation and the 13th amendment weren't really freed, but rather enserfed.
 

Nikephoros

Banned
It's funny how his answer is linking to a document where the Cherokee say essentially this.

The Five Civilized Tribes took with them some of their 'tributers' on the trek west of the Mississippi. As far as I'm concerned, if you have to follow your 'tributee' anywhere he goes, even if it's done by forcing him to, you're a slave. No amount of legal or linguistic jungle-gym play will get around this, just like the blacks 'freed' by the emancipation proclamation and the 13th amendment weren't really freed, but rather enserfed.

Do you have the ability to post the pertaining section? Much appreciated.
 
Do you have the ability to post the pertaining section? Much appreciated.

His document isn't available on the internet (or at least in a cursory search), but if it says anything like this:

The Cherokee Nation actually passed a resolution denouncing the slave owners as alien to their culture, white in mind and spirit.

then it is basically saying, "Only white people can be slave owners", completely ignoring the fact that the Cherokees happily owned and ran slave-worked plantations in both the old, eastern lands and in Oklahoma.
 
It's funny how his answer is linking to a document where the Cherokee say essentially this.

The Five Civilized Tribes took with them some of their 'tributers' on the trek west of the Mississippi. As far as I'm concerned, if you have to follow your 'tributee' anywhere he goes, even if it's done by forcing him to, you're a slave. No amount of legal or linguistic jungle-gym play will get around this, just like the blacks 'freed' by the emancipation proclamation and the 13th amendment weren't really freed, but rather enserfed.

Heres a link to a good, although brief, article about slavery among the Cherokee. And to another longer one. Slaves were slaves, and treated as such. And were discriminated against after the war.
 

Nikephoros

Banned
I figure I'd post the pertaining pieces from those articles:

From: http://nativeamericanfirstnationshistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/cherokee_and_slavery

A divided Cherokee nation managed to gradually recover and develop a strong agricultural base. This economy was based on slave labor and, like the U.S., the Cherokee reaped the rewards of this practice. The moral questions over holding a population in bondage that created a contentious debate within the greater United States also carried over into the Cherokee Nation. Those in favor of the existence of slavery in the Cherokee state, however, were clearly in the majority.

The proponents of slavery adopted a system of absolute control over the lives of the slaves, even making it a crime to teach a slave to read in 1848. By 1960, the total slave population within the Cherokee Nation reached 2,511--representing a significant portion of the population.

I assume that is a typo.

As a means of distancing themselves from this new class of freedmen, the Cherokee relegated them to the Cooweescoowee District in the northeast corner of tribal territory. Though technically citizens of the Cherokee Nation, the Freedmen were viewed as an underclass. They were not permitted to attend tribal schools and were denied the basic civil services. It took direct pressure from President Rutherford B Hayes to convince the Cherokee to establish schools for Freedmen in 1879.

From: http://www.sfu.ca/~stw1/cherokee_slavery.html

In preparation for the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation from the American Southeast, the United States federal government conducted a census of the Nation in 1835. Besides people, livestock, industries and acreages, the Census tallied something one would not normally expect to find in a First Nations society: 1,592 African slaves.

Besides participating in the slave trade as both traffickers and chattel, Cherokees began to keep black slaves for themselves. While these slaves existed in a traditional Cherokee economic milieu, the fact that their status was attributable to blackness signalled a change in Cherokee politics. This phenomenon has habitually been attributed to the Westernized values of mixed-blood sons and daughters of English traders, but more recent scholarship has worked to change this perception. Halliburton points out that one of the first Cherokee women to own a black slave was full-blooded, while Theda Perdue, in her more recent work, has argued that the racial background of individuals was insignificant compared to their upbringing in Cherokee culture. While this may be overstating the case—the majority of slave-owners were, in fact, of mixed heritage—it raises an important point: to use European heritage as the sole rubric to understand the changing values of Cherokee society is to essentialize race and reduce culture to what Claudio Saunt et al refer to as “animal husbandry.”

Tiya Miles’s assessment of oral histories has led her to conclude that the average Cherokee slaveholder was less oppressive than his white counterpart, although she admits that some major Cherokee plantation owners, such as James Vann, were capable of extreme cruelty. Theda Perdue argues that the violence inherent in slave-ownership was tempered so long as the Cherokee remained in their traditional territory, and supports her argument with examples of Cherokee slave codes that were more lenient than those of the American South. Halliburton disagrees, arguing that, “as slavery continued to mature as an institution, it became virtually identical with that of the southern states.” Michael Doran emphasizes the high proportion of slaveholders who were of mixed lineage, implicitly arguing that slave-ownership never became a full feature of Cherokee society. Perdue, in her more recent work, rebuts that viewpoint, expounding that the mixed-blood Cherokees, and, by extension, their economic practices, must be considered first and foremost as a sector of Cherokee society.

Regardless of the characteristics of Cherokee slavery, by 1826 the institution had certainly become a crucial part of the economy. Although only 7.4 percent of Cherokee families owned slaves, those families tended to be the richest and most powerful. With the emergence of property rights and patrilineal inheritance, power and slaves were transferred together, increasing the relative wealth of the slave-owning class. The difficulty of challenging slavery in Cherokee culture was shown by the actions of those who brought political or religious messages to the nation: the Shawnee prophet Tecumseh did not mention slavery (an obvious symptom of Westernized culture, the vice he was crusading against) in his 1811 attempts to recruit Cherokees to his anti-American alliance, and the belief that the Cherokee elite would never embrace Christianity if it meant giving up their slaves led the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to downplay its distaste for slavery in order to make influential converts. For Cherokee slaveholders, slavery was no longer a means to an end: it was a way of life.

This sudden change of incentives did not, however, put an end to slave-ownership: Cherokee culture had changed, and black slaves were now as much a feature of Cherokee life as the atsi nahsa’i had once been. Some Cherokee who owned industrial wealth sold their factories and bought slaves, thereby making their capital more portable. Black slaves accompanied their Cherokee owners on the Trail of Tears, and over 125 slaves and 4,000 Cherokee died along the way. The new Cherokee nation in the Indian Territory was a slaveholding nation; Miles argues that the exploitation of slave labour was the main reason that the Cherokee were able to rebuild their society after being geographically uprooted and demographically devastated.

The history of Cherokee slave-ownership prior to removal shows the extent to which members of that nation were willing to adapt their cultural practises to a new colonial situation. The designation of a racially designated class of owned labour was inconsistent with the egalitarian, communal and matrilineal social structure that governed traditional Cherokee life; this latter fell away as slaveholders became the primary actors in their country’s development. The institution of slavery was used by the U.S. government as a tool of cultural assimilation, and by the Cherokee as a tool of political resistance. When that resistance ultimately failed, the Cherokee found themselves living in a foreign land, with a culture that their ancestors would not have recognized.
 
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