(1806-71)
Cherokee political leader, Confederate general, and principal chief of the Confederate Cherokees
Born on December 29, 1806, at Oothcaloga, Cherokee Nation, Georgia, Stand Watie was given the tribal name De-ga-ta-ga ("He Stands"). He was the son of Oo-wa-tie ("The Ancient One"), a full-blood Cherokee, and Oo-wa-tie's half-blood wife, Susanna Charity Reese. Watie had an older brother, Kilakeena (also known as Buck Watie or Elias Boudinot) and seven younger siblings: Thomas Black, John Alexander, Charles Edwin, Nancy, Mary Ann, Elizabeth, and Susan. After accepting Christianity, Oo-wa-tie dropped the Oo from his Cherokee name to form the surname Watie and was known as David Watie. He gave Stand Watie the Christian name Isaac, and, although his son called himself Isaac S. Watie for a while, he eventually dropped Isaac and became known as Stand Watie.
In 1815 Watie was dispatched, along with his brother Buck, to the Moravian Mission School at Spring-place, Georgia, where Watie was baptized into the Moravian Church. Upon completing his education, Watie returned home to oversee the family farm, while Buck continued his training for a leadership position among the Cherokees. Prior to removal, Watie married the first three of his four wives—Eleanor Looney, Elizabeth Fields, and Isabel Hicks. None of these marriages produced children. His fourth marriage was to Sarah Caroline Bell in 1843.
Watie's early career was overshadowed by his more politically active relatives such as his brother; his uncle, Major Ridge; and his cousin, John Ridge. As a member of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot faction, Watie became embroiled in the question of Cherokee removal. Watie's "mixed-blood" faction was convinced that the only way to maintain tribal sovereignty was to accept removal to the West. This position, however, was unpopular among most "full-blood" Cherokees, who constituted a majority of the tribe and were led by Principal Chief John Ross.
In 1834 Major Ridge and Elias Boudinot negotiated a removal treaty with the federal government. This unsanctioned sale of tribal land was a violation of Cherokee law and was punishable by death. However, the treaty was rejected by the U.S. Senate. Undaunted, another pro-removal council was called at Running Waters, Georgia, in November 1834. That assembly asked the government to remove the Cherokees to the West. Watie was among the fifty-seven Cherokees who signed the petition, which was the final break between the pro- and anti-removal factions.
In August 1835, Watie was named editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, a Cherokee-language newspaper that called for a removal treaty. Three months later, on December 1, Watie left for Washington, D.C., as a member of a pro-removal delegation. While he was absent another pro-removal council, led by Boudinot and the Ridges, convened at New Echota, Georgia, and negotiated the Treaty of New Echota. Signed on December 25, the agreement traded the Cherokee Nation in Georgia for $5 million and a new home in present-day Oklahoma. As soon as Watie returned to Georgia he added his name to this document.
Watie moved to the Cherokee Nation West in 1837 and settled on Honey Creek just across the Oklahoma-Missouri border southwest of Southwest City, Missouri. He maintained a farm there and operated a general-merchandise store at nearby Millwood. Meanwhile, the majority of Cherokees, led by John Ross, worked against the agreement and vowed to remain in Georgia. But by 1838, it was clear that resistance was futile. The federal government had ordered the military to enforce the removal treaty, and the rest of the tribe began to move west over what came to be called the Trail of Tears. An estimated four thousand Cherokees—one-fourth of those undertaking the journey—died along the way.
The bitterness over removal dominated Cherokee politics for decades to come. In June 1839 Ross's followers gathered at Takuttokah near the Grand River to punish the pro-removal party under Cherokee law. The gathering condemned Watie, Boudinot, Major Ridge, and John Ridge to death, and on June 22, 1839, the Ridges and Elias Boudinot were assassinated. Watie barely escaped. With the murder of his brother, uncle, and cousin, Watie assumed the leadership of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot group within the Cherokee tribe. Another brother, Thomas, was murdered in 1845. Civil war raged among the Cherokees until federal officials intervened and forced the Cherokee Treaty of 1846 upon the tribe. Although this agreement supposedly reunited the Cherokees, bitterness and hatred continued to smolder until the outbreak of the Civil War.
In the decade and a half between the Cherokee Treaty of 1846 and the Civil War, Watie and Sarah Caroline Bell Watie had three sons—Saladin Ridge (1846), Solon Watica (1849), and Cumiskey (1851)—and two daughters—Ninnie Josephine (1852) and Charlotte Jacqueline (1857). Watie also served as the Delaware District's representative to the Cherokee National Council, rising to the position of speaker. In addition, he began his legal practice and was active in the Knights of the Golden Circle, an avidly pro-slavery group.
The false peace imposed on the Cherokees by the Treaty of 1846 ended with the secession of the South from the United States in 1861. Commissioned a Confederate colonel in July of that year, Watie raised the Cherokee Regiment of Mounted Rifles, which he hoped to use to seize the leadership of the Cherokees from the pro-Union Ross. Forced by Watie either to sign an alliance with the Confederacy or to face a Southern coup, Ross reluctantly sided with the South. The alliance was purely one of convenience, however, and in 1862 the chief fled the Cherokee Nation for Philadelphia. Shortly afterward, in August 1862, Watie was elected principal chief of the Confederate Cherokees.
Watie saw action at Wilson's Creek (1861), Chustenahlah (1861), Pea Ridge (1861), Cowskin Prairie (1862), Old Fort Wayne (1862), Webbers Falls (1863), the First Battle of Cabin Creek (1863), and a myriad of skirmishes. Promoted to brigadier general on May 6, 1864, he was given command of the First Indian Cavalry Brigade. He was the only Confederate Indian to achieve the rank of general in the Civil War. Watie became best known for guerrilla warfare. His two greatest victories came in 1864 with the capture of the federal steamboat J. R. Williams and the seizure of $1.5 million worth of supplies in a federal wagon supply train at the Second Battle of Cabin Creek. Watie surrendered on June 23, 1865, the last Confederate general to do so.
After the war Watie served as a member of the Southern Cherokee delegation during the negotiation of the Cherokee Reconstruction Treaty of 1866 and as a delegate to the General Council for Indian Territory in 1870 and 1871. However, after Ross's death in 1866 he began to retreat from politics and joined with Elias Cornelius Boudinot, Buck Watie's son, to form the Boudinot and Watie Tobacco Company. Their claim of exemption from the federal excise tax on tobacco was denied in the Cherokee Tobacco Case in 1871, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that congressional action took precedence over the sovereignty implied in Indian treaties.
Tired of tribal politics, Watie longed to return to his home on Honey Creek, where he spent much of his time refurbishing the family farm. While he worked there, his family remained in a temporary home in Webbers Falls. He was at his Honey Creek farm when he died on September 9, 1871. At the time the Grand River was flooding, and his family found it impossible to return his body to Webbers Falls. As a result he was buried in the Old Ridge Cemetery (also called Polson Cemetery) in Delaware County.
Watie left no direct descendants. None of his children married, and all died without issue. After Watie's death Sarah moved to a cabin near the junction of Horse Creek and Grand River. She died there in 1883 and was buried near her home. Nearly a century later she was reinterred next to Watie in Polson Cemetery.
The conflict between Watie and Ross characterized Cherokee politics for almost half a century and continued to influence the Cherokee Nation long after their deaths. The bitterness over removal, the suffering of the Trail of Tears, and the destruction of the Civil War still divide the tribe. The tribal divisions that Watie helped to sustain have been impressed indelibly on the history of the Cherokees.
See also
Boudinot, Elias;
Civil War in Indian Territory, The;
Ridge, John Rollin;
Ridge, Major;
Ross, John;
Trail of Tears.
Edward E. Dale, Cherokee Cavaliers: Forty Years of Cherokee History as Told in the Correspondence of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot Family (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939); Kenny A. Franks, Stand Watie and the Agony of the Cherokee Nation (Memphis, Tenn.: Memphis State University Press, 1979); Wilfred Knight, Red Fox: Stand Watie's Civil War Years in Indian Territory (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1988).
Kenny A. Franks
Oklahoma Heritage Association
