General Stand Watie's Confederate Indians

by Frank Cunningham, Brad Agnew (Foreword)

This is the story of Stand Watie, the only Indian to attain the rank of general in the Confederate Army. An aristocratic, prosperous slaveholding planter and leader of the Cherokee mixed bloods, Watie was recruited in Indian Territory by Albert Pike to fight the Union forces on the western front. He organized the First Cherokee Rifles on July 29, 1861, and was commissioned a colonel. In 1864, after battling at Wilson’s Creek and Pea Ridge, he became brigadier general. Watie was the last Confederate general to lay down his arms in surrender, two months after Appomattox. In his foreword, Brad Agnew discusses Watie’s role in the Civil War and his reception by later historians.

Genres: Civil War, History, Military Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1998

Reviews

[EJ Daniels]

There was a brand of historical writing popular in the early 20th century that has largely been lost; a way of writing history as though it were an adventure novel. Frank Cunningham's biography of Stand Watie and of the conduct of the "Confederate Indians" during the War Between the States is a prime example of such writing, with all of its thrills and all of its faults.

Cunningham's biography is clearly intended as a paean to a heroic figure whom history has forgotten. Stand Watie is held up as an epic hero who easily compares to Jo Shelby, William Quantrill, John S. Marmaduke, et al., and Cunningham wants to make sure that his readers know this. Thus, Cunningham tends to de-emphasize Watie's faults and relishes his many successes. Cunningham remains true to historical events, however, and despite the rose tint of his glasses, his biography remains a gripping and engaging chronicle of history.

And however dated it may be, Cunningham's treatment remains the only long-form history pertaining exclusively to Stand Watie and his Cherokee Mounted Rifles; without it, the historian is limited to asides and chapters in larger histories of Indians during the War Between the States. Cunningham is also valuable for his inclusion, often unedited, of contemporary battlefield and newspaper accounts and reports from the US and CS departments of Indian Affairs not easily found elsewhere.

I would recommend this book for any armchair general interested in an often overlooked aspect of the Trans-Mississippi Theatre of the War Between the States and for scholars of Indians history during the War Between the States who aren't averse to a few eyebrow raising turns of phrase.

[Matt]

I am writing my Master’s thesis on the First Nations peoples who fought for the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, so when I found this book, I was very excited. I was hoping to get some good ideas and information for further study. However, I was disappointed.
I found very little in this book that I could put as a positive review. I have to commend the author for writing about a relatively overlooked topic in the Civil War. While Stand Watie has not been completely forgotten, he and his soldiers rarely appear in standard history texts, so this book does help somewhat to rectify that situation. [I have my own theories as to why Stand Watie has been “forgotten,” but I won’t go into that here.]
Sadly, I found several reasons to become disappointed with this book and, ultimately, not feel that I could recommend it. The most frustrating aspect of this book was the percentage of the work actually dedicated to Stand Watie and his troops. The author constantly goes off on side stories that have little-to-nothing to do with Gen. Watie and that include massive quotations from letters and dispatches that only have the most rudimentary connection to Watie. I felt like I was reading a history of the war in the West more than reading about Watie and his troops. While interesting information did exist in these side stories, they did little to help the stated purpose of the book.
Further, the author had a very strong bias that plainly colored everything he wrote. To be clear, every author will have a bias, and I don’t fault any author for attempting to prove a point. But Cunningham wrote on the level of hero-worship, demonstrating little objectivity. Every (or almost every) Union commander was portrayed as cruel and/or incompetent, while Watie (and almost every Confederate) was viewed as intelligent and noble, only losing because of mistakes outside of their control. Again, I don’t fault the author’s bias towards the Confederacy; I cannot, however, justify the rather blatant disregard for any objectivity.
As should probably be evident by now, this book was definitely not written as an academic source. The lack of references was disappointing, but I cannot fault the author too much for this, since he never claimed to be writing a scholarly source. I simply add this statement as a warning to future readers who – like me – might come to this book with hopes of finding “further reading” resources.
In the end, this book was not a complete waste of time, but that is the best I can say about it. I cannot recommend it for anything beyond an interesting look at the historiography of the 1950-60s. Anyone desiring an evenhanded or scholarly history of Stand Watie or the First Nations’ involvement in the Civil War should probably look elsewhere.

[Ben]

I was very disappointed by this book. After learning that the last Confederate General to surrender was Cherokee, I decided I had to learn more. Since this book was published by a university press, I figured it would be decent. Boy was I wrong.

The author was not a historian and it showed. Too much reliance on block quotes and little analysis of what occurred and discussion of why other than obvious complaints that the Confederacy lost the war. It was a little hard to take and put all the lessons I learned about being objective and not judging authors to the test. I would not recommend this to anyone. I am sure there are other good texts on General Waite -- try those.

[FellowBibliophile KvK]

Powerful read about the horror of war, the deprivation and the misery.

Both sides in the Indian Territory during the Civil War were underequipped and undersupplied. It is just that the North had more men than did the South, and as much as the Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks and Seminoles were ready to wage full-scale war on behalf of the Confederacy, Richmond was simply never able to fully supply them with functional rifles, or even food.

That being said, the Cherokees on a couple of occasions, held their own against conventional Northern forces, including the routing of General Lyons in Missouri and, with Captain Quantrill's troops, they smashed two Federal Missouri Cavalry Regiments and routed an Arkansas Federal Cavalry Regiment at Cane Hill in December 1862, liberating the recently captured General Jo Shelby in the process, thus demolishing Gian Gentile's assertion that troops who spend time in partisan warfare need intensive retraining before redeploying for conventional Clausewitzian operations.

More often than not, the Confederate forces that Stand Watie and his Cherokees were operating with did not prevail against Federals because the Federals had more men and a marginally better resupply system. It was as a Ho Chi Minh -style partisan that Stand Watie inflicted grievous afflictions on the Federals, such as the Williams operation and Cabin Creek.

Likewise, Stand Watie did eventually surrender, so, contrary to the blatherings of fanatical Clausewitzians like Andrew Bacevich, Douglas Porch and Gian Gentile, America did have success in fighting anti-partisan wars, the difference between Indian Territory during the Civil War and Vietnam being that, unlike Vietnam, Federal Colonel Phillips and Federal General Blunt did not spend the majority of their time in the AO playing tennis at the Cercle Sportif.

There are a couple of inaccuracies. The author calls Captain Quantrill "Charly"and says that Colonel John Singleton Mosby "surrendered." In reality, "Charlie Hart" was an alias Quantrill used as a civilian and Mosby disbanded the 43rd Virginia Cavalry before the Federals came around to force it to surrender.

Otherwise, this is a good book, one that Andrew Bacevich, Douglas Porch and Gian Gentile hope and pray that you never read because it does to their narrative what the torpedo did to the:Lusitania.

[Pandaduh]

It's too bad that there isn't a lot of other work out there covering this. I really wish to see this aspect of history covered in a film or show. We have great adaptations like The Good Lord Bird but nothing that shows this horrific aspect of the civil war -- the politics, the murders, the ideologies would make it ripe for storytelling.

Read for the foreword. Read because there is so little else.

[James T. Stewart]

I gave this book a 3 as the poor paragraphing typical of the period in which it was written made it difficult to read and understand who was who. Members of different tribes and different armies are named and renamed in paragraphs without disclosing who they were or what army or tribe the represented.

Additionally, in these long paragraphs, the pronoun "he" was used liberally and it was difficult to determine which person in the paragraph the "he" referred to. But the book did give me some knowledge of the role of the Cherokees in the War.

I read this book to learn more about the Cherokees and their role in the "Late Unpleasantness" as well as their leaders after they settled in the "Indian Territory" and to educate myself as to the leadership at that time I had no idea that a goodly portion of the Cherokee engaged in combat in the War. John Ross, was presented in this book as a crafty politician, which he probably was, but the importance to him of the $5 million dollars the USA owed the Cherokees as part of the bounty newer paid would have made any leader of the Cherokees reluctant to openly support the Confederate government. The whole Cherokee story is very interesting, including the number of slaves they owned (black, white, and Indian slaves), how they developed a written language and had a newspaper, and how they were an farmers and their relatively sophisticated form of government. (See the next paragraph). I presume the Cherokees never got the money from the US government, though I haven't pursued that detail. But most of what the US government promised the Indians was a pack of lies and the Indian agents of the US government literally had a license to steal with no recourse by the Indians. This is a sad, but true commentary as to the lack of truthfulness and integrity of the US government.....

The Cherokee Memorial Park in Birchwood, TN is worth visiting to get a feel of the discordant issues with the Cherokee removal and the leaders who were for or against being moved to the "Indian Territory". What you will not learn at the Memorial Park is how many Cherokees slipped away from the march of the "Trail of Tears" and their descendants still live in TN. Longtime families in TN can give a good oral history of the many, many families still living in TN who are descendants of Cherokees who "disappeared" from the "Trail of Tears" forced march to "Indian Territory". But the infighting between tribe members continued in Oklahoma and a lot of it had to do with whose pockets the money that was paid to the Cherokees to get them to move went.

[Graham Bradley]

Second reading. Dry and technical at times, but a story worth remembering in the larger saga of the CW.