Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism

Abstract

through warfare was a longstanding element of Choctaw culture, but one that had been largely impossible for much of the nineteenth century. Fighting in the Civil War, then, offered Choctaw men an opportunity to fight as their ancestors had done and to carry on an important cultural tradition. Yarbrough concludes the book with an analysis of the aftershocks of the U.S. Civil War in the Choctaw Nation. Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to Indian Territory, the surrender of the Confederacy allowed the U.S. to demand the abolition of slavery within the Nation. Nonetheless, Choctaws resisted this demand for decades, asserting their sovereign right to deny newly-freed Black people rights or land within the Nation. Yarbrough thus finds that Reconstruction in the West also worked differently than in the South. Where southern elites tried their best to bind Black people to the land, Choctaws sought instead to remove them completely. Yarbrough tells a compelling story throughout Choctaw Confederates, but one that leans heavily on Choctaw elites as representatives of the Nation as a whole. This is most prominent in the early chapters, where it remains unclear whether the Choctaw National Council’s laws were the aspirational demands of a small group of slaveholding elites or representative of the desires of the Nation’s population more broadly. In a related vein, Yarbrough’s careful study of those who signed up to fight invites questions about the lives of those who chose not to or, in the case of Choctaw women, could not. These questions are, however, for other scholars to take on. Choctaw Confederates is a highly impressive book that breaks important new ground both in the history of the Choctaw Nation and Native American nations’ participation in the U.S. Civil War more broadly. Specialists on the Civil War, American slavery, and Native American history will find it essential reading, but Yarbrough’s lucid prose also makes this book easily assignable in advanced undergraduate classes.